Dispatches From the Moderate Left

It's Over

2006-10-30T12:47:00.000+10:30

I think it's time to make official what has been pretty obvious for the past few weeks... this blog is no more. There's various logistical reasons, exams, sporadic internet access, employment next year, but mainly I don't have much left to say. I was thinking of converting my recent essay on the WTO and Democracy for a final post, but it's a fairly technical subject and I'm not sure I can condense the essence of the argument into a post which isn't ridiculously long.

Anyway, blogging has been a fun experience, I like to think I wrote some fairly thoughtful stuff on a lot of subjects, thought I'm sure much more of what I wrote would inspire cringing if I re-read it. I've maintained a reasonably consisteny readership of about 20 visitors a day, about half of which are from search engines, which is pretty much what I expected given how technical and sporadic my writing tends to be. Thanks to everyone who's read and especially to those who've commented (if you've read and not commented, I'd be interested to hear from you now!).

I'd like to finish with some witty and enlightening summary of my political philosophy and the world around me, but I can't really. I think my last quote of the week does a pretty good job of summing why I've become so pessimistic about politics over the past couple of years - "as a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use". Very little political discourse I see on the web or elsewhere makes any attempt to meaningfully grapple with opposing views and data, which is a depressing state of affairs.

My further political pessimism comes from a slow realisation at how little impact the sort of political discourse I observe and occasionally participate in has on the wider electorate. Parties and Presidents don't seem to get voted out of office unless factors largely out of their control go haywire (the economy, petrol prices). Fuzzy concepts like good governance, civil liberties (I'm still somewhat depressed that the US legalised torture), parliamentary/ministerial responsibility, openness and accountability are essentially ignored and even things like basic competence seem to take a back seat to the image which can be projected.

My pessimism is fuelling my current feeling that the US Republicans won't lose either house in the midterms, that the Bracks government will leave its promises of open and transparent government further behind when it's re-elected and that the only thing thing which will put Labor in power Federally is a recession. That's not to say I don't believe that the political process can generate good outcomes, overall the Australian political system seems to me one of the most moderate and rational around. I just think there's a massive disconnect between what the "political class" cares about and what influences voters, meaning political discussion can be interesting and occasionally enlightening, but very rarely a catalyst for actual change.

So much for a short final post... that's all, I'm out.

This is Not Me

2006-10-19T12:10:00.000+09:30

Just in case you were wondering (as one sharp-eyed reader did!):

That is my name, but it's not my face. Nor would I do this:

Strict Mormon Campbell Walshe is taking legal action against his league, claiming discrimination after missing a premiership play-off last month.

The midfielder and two teammates, ruckman Jeremy and fellow midfielder Stephen Hoare, abstained because their religion forbids sport on Sundays.

"Sunday is the Lord's day," Walshe said. "It is a day devoted to worship, attending church and spending time with family and friends."

I mean, even if I played footy, I'd have the same attitude to playing on Sunday, but legal action seems to be going way too far. I mean what happens if Sunday is out so they have to go to Saturday and then a Jewish player invokes the 4th commandment? I can't see how that'd work...

Quote of the Week

2006-10-07T14:37:00.000+09:30

The way our pre-existing biases influence the way we interpret new data is something that has long been of interest to me. For example, I find it fascinating the way that political radicals and conspiracy theorists have a habit of using the fact that something is verified by mainstream sources as a point against its veracity and openly embrace claims by 'fringe' sources without much critical examination. On that note, I recently ran across a quote by an American philosopher/psychologist, William James, from a collection of his late 19th century writings:

[A]s a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use.

So very, if regrettably, true.

Picture of the Week

2006-10-07T11:50:00.000+09:30

Following on from my previous post, this telling photo is doing the rounds:

How many countries in the world are dangerous enough that Condi needs to wear a bullet proof jacket at while disembarking at the main airport? And in how many of them has the US spent a few hundred billion dollars and a couple of hundred thousand troops in an attempt to establish security?

Mission Impossible

2006-10-03T17:10:00.000+09:30

Ever since the occupation and insurgency of Iraq began in earnest, right wing commentators and bloggers have been attempting to spread the meme that things in Iraq aren't as bad as the media makes it look like and that the country will soon be stable. Some three and a half years of unabated violence later, it's pretty clear that the rosy picture in those people's minds is far from reality. There were reports last month that 7,000 civilians had died in violent circumstances in the previous two months, a conservative estimate given that data was not collected from two regions due to them being too dangerous. This represents a death toll of about 120/day, which is an enormous figure in a country of some 28m people and, sadly, empirically comparable to the average number of people killed by Saddam's regime.

The Brookings fact sheet, which is a fantastic resource for Iraq statistics, gives a further impression of the continuing high level of violence. Bearing in mind that the line graphs there look somewhat misleading because they count figures from the first few days of October, almost every indication of the level of violence in the country has either been roughly steady for the past two years (US and Iraqi troop fatalities, car bomb levels) or increasing (multiple fatality bombings). And while some of the polls in that fact sheet show Iraqis to be fairly optimistic about the future in the face of this violence, a recent poll also seem to indicate that they don't think that international troops should stay around to help them to a more peaceful future.

These statistics are genuinely depressing but not of themselves useful to those of us less interested in beating anti-Iraq war horses and more interested in the question of what should be done now to try and fix these problems. Unfortunately, as a recent Slate rundown of foreign policy thinking on the subject shows, no one really seems to know how to answer that question. The hawkish wing of the spectrum is advocating that the US send more troops, which might be an idea worth thinking about if there weren't no more troops to send.

The opposite end of the spectrum continues to advocate short-term withdrawal, without any real attempt to grapple with the question of what that would do to the security sitiation in the country. Those in the middle have put up ideas ranging from an "oil-spot" approach to a radical breakup of the country, which have either been tried and failed in Iraq already (the former) or seem exceptionally likely to create failure in the region formerly known as Iraq. And, finally, the US ambassador to Iraq has another idea - involving "manipulat[ing] the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to coerce them to negotiate" - which seems somewhat crazy to me, given that it would involve the US to attack milita belonging to the Shia majority.

To conclude - the US is losing the war in Iraq, the Iraqi people are being killed by terrorists and their fellow citizens at an alarming rate and no one, of any political leaning, has any real idea of how to make the situation better. And looking at all the options, I'm not even sure which is the best of a bad bunch. These are the sorts of problems you get when you invade a country with cavalier optimisim and no real plan for what to do once you conquer the place. I get absolutely no satisfaction from concluding this, but I haven't read anything in the past six months that isn't consistent with it. And it's yet more confirmation that war is the H-Word.

Disillusion Everywhere

2006-09-30T10:23:00.000+09:30

What popular lefty blogger Atrios writes isn't usually frothing at the mouth extremist stuff. It's militant and regularly somewhat over the top, but it usually has a hint of moderation and insight into reality. But for whatever reason (perhaps because of their completely open nature) his comments attract a very extremist crowd which responds to most posts with at least a hundred voices crying out in almost perfectly uniform rage, repeating perfectly predictable hyperbole. So Atrios' comments are a good place to go to gauge the mood of the far left. And while the far right is certainly disillusioned with their party in the leadup to November's US mid-term election I think I might have underestimated just how disillusioned the far left is.

Before voting against the recent Torture Bill Hillary Clinton gave a fairly stirring speech higlighting America's long, principled opposition to torture. It's a little long (5:29) but it's worth watching:

Atrios recently posted the full text of the speech, without comment. As of today he has received 1621 comments in reply. Now, comment mining is usually uninformative, but I think a sample of the comments gives an extraordinarily strong impression of disillusionment at Democrats among the far left, to the point where it is going to be extremely difficult to motivate a lot of them to vote. Ellipses in between each comment, edited for language and some comments in italics:

Wasted words, I'm afraid.
...
She's filibustering, right?

Right?

Otherwise I don't want to hear from the b****
...
And as for Mr. Barack, I assume 'Osama' is the word in some indigenous Kenyan language for 'trimmer'. I have no idea what this means, but I'm pretty sure it's a fairly nasty slur at Rising Democrat star Barak Obama, whose speech opposing the amendment was previously posted in the same manner
...
So what? Stirring words, but so the f*** what.
...
More purty words.

So what?
...
They are all cowards and they cannot be trusted lead. In short, they are afraid.
...
The silence of the Democratic leadership is deafening and disturbing. Even if they win in November, is it worth this? Chucking habeas corpus? Allowing the Prez to determine FOR HIMSELF what the Geneva Conventions are, what torture is? Rendering prisoners in the fight against terror into a veritable black hole of hell, with no recourse for those who may be innocent?

If they think it is, then they are as damnable as the fascisti they're seeking to replace. They say they want to show they can govern, but if they can't stand firmly behind intrepid constitutional values, and a day or two away from the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg laws, then they don't deserve anyone's vote.

They won't be getting mine.

These aren't entirely representative as there were some positive responses, but they're indicative of the fairly widespread anger there. Specifically, the commenters are mostly angy that no Democrat filibusted the bill which is a procedural tactic which minorities in the US Senate have previously been able to use to indefinitely stall debate on an issue unless they are overrided by a 60 senators (out of 100). I say previously, because it's not a tactic realistically open to the Democrats at the moment after the Republicans showed their willingness last year to abolish the filibuster entirely (the 'nuclear option'), a move which would only take a straight majority vote. The Democrats don't have a majority in the Senate and it's fairly unreasonable for their supporters to hold them to a standard of 'if you can't stop the majority, we won't vote for you', but looking over the comments there, that's pretty much what I see. And if their supporters are that disillusioned then that doesn't bode well for the Democrats in a few weeks time.

Update: I should also mention that the Republican senate has pretty much appeased the base on the issue I thought they were cracking up on - immigration - by passing an act which will create a fence/wall between the US and Mexico across much of the border. I'm going to go and make a rash prediction that the Dems will make electoral gains across the board in November but will not gain majorities in either the House or the Senate. Creepy sex scandals notwithstanding

This Week In History...

2006-09-29T21:28:00.000+09:30

...The US legalised torture. Not the very most severe torture, but torture nevertheless. I've said it before and I fear I'll have cause to say it again - it's not about them, it's about us. And the fact that the between the two just narrowed a litle bit in a crucial way is a sad fact worth noting.

The Pope and Islam

2006-09-26T18:22:00.000+09:30

I'm in essay writing mode at the moment, so in lieu of a proper post, I'll exceprt parts of an interesting interview (via Sullivan) with a dude with a fancy title - "president of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome" - on the Pope's recent and somewhat controversial comments regarding Islam. I found it interesting because it closely echoes my thoughts on the subject:

Q. Juan Cole of the University of Michigan has said that Surah 2:256 (“There is no compulsion in religion”)—to which the pope made reference in his speech—is not from the Prophet’s early days, as the pope asserted, but from when the Prophet was ruler of Medinah. Samir Khalil Samir, SJ, disagrees and says the pope’s dates are right. Who is correct? More important, can one make sweeping statements about Islam’s views on violence and religious tolerance relying solely on the Qur’an while ignoring the Hadith (commentary), the Sharia (law), and the entire history of the religion?

A.The consensus of scholars, both Muslim and non-Muslim, is that Surah 2 is from the Medinah period, when Muhammad had increasing political power.
...
The second part of your question is more important. It seems to me essential not to lock Muslims into one particular reading of their texts and traditions. It is nonsensical to say to someone who claims that Islam is a peaceful religion that he may not believe such a thing because the Qur’an says such-and-such. She should be encouraged to believe that Islam is peaceful and held to observe that.

There is much more violence in the Bible than in the Qur’an. Here is a line from the Psalms, the backbone of Christian and Jewish daily worship: “A blessing on him who takes your babies and dashes them against the rocks!” (Ps. 137:9). We cannot deny the presence of such verses in our Scripture and worship, yet we do not think of them as defining our attitude to enemies. As for the New Testament, it is not without verses open to a violent interpretation: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Mt. 10:34).

The point of quoting these texts is not to claim that Christianity and Judaism are inherently violent religions, but to offer proof that scripture passages which apparently justify and even glorify violence do not necessarily make for a violent religion. Christians and Jews have ways of reading their scriptures that allow them to maintain their sacredness without considering large parts of them normative for behaviour or attitudes. Muslims have traditionally used similar methods of interpretation.

This is why trawling the Qur'an for violent verses and extrapolating from the findings to the actions and beliefs of modern day Muslims is an intellectually bankrupt exercise. Yes there do exist Muslims who justify their cause by using these verses but to declare all other Muslims guilty by association is as offensive/ridiculous to them as it is to accuse Christians of sharing the beliefs of the Crusaders or the Dominionists. Actually, it's worse because far too many people buy into the "Islam is a religion of the sword" argument.

Picture of the Week

2006-09-21T09:22:00.000+09:30

A post over at Brendan Nyhan's blog highlights the somewhat bizzare practice of US government departments' childrens mascots. I think this hyperactive bunch, the National Security Agency's CryptoKids, is my favourite:

Stanley Stat and Pie Chart Pam ("Agriculture and Maths Fun!"), from the US Department of Agriculture, have to be a close second.

Quote of the Week

2006-09-19T14:16:00.000+09:30

I'm reading some reasonably arcane international law stuff at the moment. The following quote, discussion some definitions in the GATT treaty, is unfortunately not satire:

The terms "directly" and "indirectly" do not refer to "direct" and "indirect" taxes. On the contrary, a tax applying "directly" to "products" is an indirect tax, while a tax applying "indirectly" to "products" is a direct tax. This terminological anomaly can be resolved by switching one's perspective.

Source: Kenneth W. Dam, The GATT: Law and International Economic Organization (1970).

LEO, Revisited

2006-09-18T17:19:00.000+09:30

I've mentioned before that I'm a fan of using a "Liberty, Equality, Order" spectrum for analysing political idology, in contrast to a simplistic left/right divide. I ran into this spectrum early on at university, and so I found a political scientist's attempt, at The LEO Test, to create a program which could automatically analyse the ideology of political writing very interesting when I ran across it a year or so ago. This spectrum sees the political landscape as populated by (some combination of) three distinct ideologies which can be reflected in moderate or radical positions - Liberty (libertarians, anarchists), Equality (progressives, communists) and Order (Conservatives, fascists).

Cam over at the fairly new (and quite good) group blog, Polemica, recently wrote a post expressing his dissatisfaction at the traditional left/right divide and in the ensuing discussion I brought up the LEO test. One commentor there thought that the spectrum wouldn't properly capture the ideology of post-left/right divide, community-values based parties like People Power so I decided to give the program supplied by Jonathon York another try (my last attempt at doing this showed the limits of the test as applied to judicial writings, more than disproving it more comprehensively I think). So I went to their web site and collated all the relevant text I could find, from their "about" and policies documents. Just to give an overview, here's what the party has to say for themselves (in broken html on the site):

families: the foundation of society but unrepresented by any broad, mainstream movement
consumers: our two main parties represent employers and employees, but not consumers
people with disabilities, chronic and mental illnesses and their families/carers: the most invisible and vulnerable Australians
the aged: regarded as not glamorous, important or productive in our culture
volunteers in communities: who are the glue in society but are unrepresented in any of our halls of power
small businesses and independent owners: the backbone of our economy and employment but overlooked by governments
individuals and communities who practice self-help: whose voices are rarely heard

Now, just looking at that you get the strong underlying message of "society is only as strong as its weakest member" which is a paradigm Equality value. This impression is borne out in a textual analysis of the 5000-odd words I put together from the web site:

The bars represent percentages of ideological keywords (ie 55% of keywords used reflected Equality values). Now, it's a relatively small sample of words but I think the analysis has hit on the essential ideology of the party. It's strongly egalitarian with no secondary preference for either order or liberty, given that order/conservative values of "family" and "regulation" co-exist with a respect for the dynamism and freedom of small enterprise.

One of the Polemica bloggers suggested I try the analysis on the Labor and Liberal party platforms, these being the two dominant political parties in Australia. The Liberal party likes to identify itself with small-l liberalism values, but also has a strong socially/traditionally conservative element in it which is in tension with these values. The Labor party has historical roots in the union movement although moved away from those roots somewhat when it was in power in the 80s and 90s by governing in a style in some way foreshadowed the "Third Way" of Clinton/Blair.

These platform documents aren't ideal source material for two reasons. First, while the Labor platform is very large (100,000) which is good, the Liberal one is quite small (4,000). In addition, potential nuances in the party's policies in different areas such as law and order, social areas, welfare, economic regulation, industrial relations etc. aren't reflected in such a broad brush analysis. Still, given that I don't have time to do a full analysis I decided to see what the numbers brought up. I excluded one of the data source files from the analsyis because the word "Liberal" was included as an ideological key word, which is obviously inappropriate in assessing the Liberal party. This left me with three source files, and these are the averages of the results.

Some might be surprised that these aren't exactly the same, but I do think that these graphs are reasonably reflective of reality. The Liberal party, if you read its platform (I didn't, I just scanned, but you know what I mean) likes to fancy itself as a bastion of traditional liberalism and that preference is very strongly captured. The document also emphasises the "Australian" value of egalitarianim in its emphasis on "opportunity for all", which I think explains the relatively high E score. Now, the Liberal party's actions frequently belie their rhetoric, but I do think the simple test here is picking up the ideological flavour of their rhetoric quite well.

Likewise for Labor. The emphasis is much more clearly on Equality, with no strong secondary preference, although a slight leaning towards order which is not at all incosistent with the Labor party (it has only weak committment to civil liberties issues, for instance, and is unafraid to regulate private business quite heavily in some areas). I think it's also pertinant that neither party had particularly strong ideological preferences for their primary value (the highest marker was about 47% each) which is to be expected from relatively moderate mainstream parties. All in all, I think these rough analysis confirm the usefulness of the blunt textual analysis of The LEO Test in analysing the ideological content of political writing.

Off Topic

2006-09-18T12:21:00.000+09:30

In lieu of posting a proper post while I'm busy reading endless pdfs on international economic law, if you have Adobe 7.0 then load up any pdf and hit control shift v. If nothing happens, highlight the next bit of text - turn your speakers up! And make sure the .pdf is text-readable and not just an image. Maybe it's just me, and maybe I'm just board, but I found that way cool...

PS. Once you've done that, the answer to your next question can be found by highlighing the next piece of text - control shift e turns it off :).

Institutional Knowledge vs Spouting From the Sidelines

2006-09-16T13:53:00.000+09:30

Given that I can't be an expert on everything, I have a habit of defering to people with relevant expertise and experience on particular questions, unless they clearly have a conflict of interest or if I've seen relevant compelling evidence contradicting their position from someone with equivalent knowledge. I try not to base my opinion of an expert's opinion on my prior prejudices. Of course I might do that unconsciously anyway, but I do make a conscious attempt not to.

Take racial profiling as a police tactic. My gut instinct is that it's not a good idea for all the usual reasons - it gives both too many false positives and negatives as well as alienating the targeted group, which is the group which law enforcement is most likely to receive unsolicited tip-offs from if it doesn't feel too alienated. However, I am prepared to conced that it might be a valid tactic for law enforcement to utilise. A group like the Australian federal police or the US FBI have a strong vested interested in keeping potential sources of information open. They have institutional experience as to both the effectiveness or otherwise and the negative effects of profiling. Given that they are the ones who bear the retaliatory consequences if they're wrong and the ones with the hands on experience, I'm usually prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. So I'm not prepared to say that, for instance, the FBIs "voluntary" request for interviews with thousands of Islamic-Americans in the immediate aftermath of September 11 was unjustified, for example.

This evidently isn't the approach that Tim Blair takes to these sorts of issues. This week the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Mick Keelty, criticised profiling as a tactic:

In a revealing interview with The Weekend Australian, Mr Keelty said racial profiling was self-defeating because it risked alienating mainstream Muslims while ignoring the real danger of homegrown non-Muslim terror.

"I remind people that the firstperson who was convicted of a terrorist offence in Australia was a person with the unlikely name of Jack Roche," the police chief said.
...
Mr Keelty said the danger of mistreating people who felt "the least bit alienated" was that they would become permanent outcasts in the community.

I'm sure he's mindful, too, of the fact that the latest UK terror plot was apparently thwarted by an unsolicited tip-off from a member of the Islamic community which the suspects were a part of and that such a vital source of information may be jeopardiesed by rough handed police tactics. I'm often a bit sceptical of police statements about policing when they're asking for more powers, because they have a natural insitutional inclination towards wanting more power and a disinclination to take competing considerations into account. But that concern is irrelevant here - the federal police have the powers to adopt a profiling policy if they so desired, but taking local considerations into account they've decided that it's not a good policy.

Anyway, Tim Blair, former Bulletin Journalist, Blogger and pontificator extraordinare apparently knows more about policing than the head of Australia's federal police, responding to Keelty's interview with the statement "Modern policing apparently involves a disinclination to examine evidence." You know, I'm not big on shouting "double standard" but it seems to me that Blair is showing a disinclination to examine evidence about policing provided by our own chief policeman. Or maybe Blair has a secret career which has given him expert knowledge on policing that I'm missing? And, no, "reading conservative opinion pieces" doesn't count, I'm afraid.

Speaking Too Soon

2006-09-14T19:52:00.000+09:30

This has to be something of a record in me being proved wrong. This time last week I wrote a post on double jeopardy and in response to the apparent reluctance of Australian State governments to abolish the rule, I noted:

it seems the Labor Attorney generals managed to restrain their authoritarian impulses in this instance, which has to be something of a first.

Well, this'll learn me:

An 800-year-old legal principle that prevents people being tried twice for the same crime twice looks set to be overturned in Australia.

The New South Wales Government has now introduced legislation to scrap the double jeopardy principal.

And the other states and the Commonwealth are now considering following suit and are expected to release a report on the issue by the end of the year.

The piece quotes Morris Iemma, the NSW premier:

Where compelling new evidence comes to light to solve a serious crime, criminals shouldn't be able to hide behind what is a legal technicality. It's just common sense.

Providing yet another example where "thinking about an issue" provides a better basis for policy making than gut feeling. Now, because the media's reporting of legal issues is universally imprecise to the point of uselessness, I'm not actually sure what the substance of this proposal is. There's 3 possibilites that I can see from what was said there:

Allowing retrial where the acquitted person secured the acquittal by committing a peversion of justice offence (eg. intimidating the jury).

Allowing retrial if evidence which, scientifically, could not have been discovered at the time of the original trial (eg. DNA)

Allowing retrial if any "compelling new evidence" comes to light

That's a pretty broad spectrum. I actually would support the first. If an accused doesn't play by the rules of the criminal justice system, they shouldn't be afforded its protections (within reason of course). The accused in our accusatorial is permitted to "wage war" against the state only to a point (eg. by remaining silent, vigorously questioning evidence, instructing a lawyer to conduct their defence, demanding the prosecution meet its burden of proof) but there are justified limits placed on this ability, and intimidating witnesses, bribing officials and otherwise perverting the system goes beyond what is justified I think. In situations where the accused has perverted the course of justice and where this perversion is causally linked to their acquittal, the prosecution and police have done their jobs and quite possibly would have secured a conviction without the accused's conduct. In this situation, there is only minimal justification for not allowing a retrial.

The second possibility, I'm much, much more equivocal about. In those sorts of situations the accused has played by the rules and, presumably, secured an acquittal by holding the prosecution to their burden, a burden they were evidently unable to satisfy. In this case it was the State's fault that the accused wasn't convicted, their fault for bringing a case against a person with insufficient reliable evidence to secure a conviction. The problem with allowing a retrial in such a situation is that it implicitely encourages and condones the State bringing to trial marginal cases. Police and prosecutors love bringing charges against people, especially in cases which reach the media spotlight, in fact doing so is a large portion of their reason for existence. This isn't to cast personal aspersions against people in these bodies, far from it. It's simply an inherent aspect of an adversarial prosecutorial culture. Just as 'ambulance chasing' tort prosecutors gain professional satisfaction in nailing the next big company, so to do public prosecutors relish the process of prosecuting the criminal bad guys. This isn't a bad thing, but it's why society needs rules to constrain them and to encourage them to take into account the interests of the person they are accusing because that person might just be innocent.

Now, I acknowledge that a specific DNA-exception is, on its own, singularly unlikely to encourage a more aggressive prosecutorial culture given that it would only apply to cold cases. But the message it sends isn't unlikely to have an effect. What it says is that, if you bring a case against someone now without enough evidence to convict them, then that isn't the end of the story. Some day in the future when we have ever better forensic technology, you might be able to charge them again. So you can be more aggressive now because there will be less consequences for you if you don't get the desired result. This is a worrying message to send.

As for the final possibility, which is as wide or wider than the English exception, it's extremely worrying. All of the above factors are relevant, but to a stronger degree and with more negative baggage. Not only would it encourage agents of the State to bring more marginal cases before the courts, it would implicitly encourage them to not diligently seek out all possible evidence safe in the knowledge that if the accused is acquitted and one of the leads they didn't seek to pursue eventually turns up "new and compelling" evidence, they could ask for a retrial. This is bad public policy, pure and simple.

The fundamental problem with the "victim's rights" movement, for all the perfectly valid feelings which underpin it and the occasionall excesses which give it just cause for complaint, is that it sees the job of the criminal justice system to produce factually correct outcomes, nothing more, no matter what the cost. But the job of the criminal justice system is to regulate social behaviour on a broader level and the rules of the system are designed to both give legitimacy to a system which takes away citizens natural rights (of self defence and retribution, for example) and prevent the State abusing the assymetric power which it has relative to its citizens. The rules are also designed to reduce the ability of the media and citizens (whether aided and abetted by the political power of the day or not) to carry out witch hunts on unpopular or superficially guilty individuals. Thhe potential (partial or full) abolishment of double jeopardy in Australia adds another worrying bow to the quiver of the populist crime media. If double jeopardy goes, and the public megaphones kick up a big enough stink then they potentially have a new prize within their grasp - retrial.

Alright, I'm Curious

2006-09-11T19:52:00.000+09:30

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about a James McConvil newspaper opinion piece from late last year "Law of the Jungle is the Best regulator." Ever since I wrote that I've been getting a consistent stream of Google hits, about half of which are people searching for the exact phrase "Law of the Jungle is the Best regulator" and half which are just searching for those words. Now, this isn't a particularly common phrase on google. The exact phrase gives 6 hits - two for the original newspaper article, one for a reprint of that one for this blog and another two for a different (and interesting) blog post on the article. The non-exact phrase obviously gives many more hits, but the newspaper article and my post come up first and second because they're obviously the closest.

My question is... why is this phrase being searched so regularly? I'm really at a loss. With the exception of the slightly creepy "black market kidneys" searches I regularly get (my posts on the subject will not help you find one, sorry people), this is the most common source of my google traffic. I've had a few dozen, perhaps close to 50 hits from either the two previous searches which is a lot by the standards of this blog. It's especially weird to me because so many of the searches are the exact phrase. It's almost as if McConvil is camping google, searching for references to his article which I would believe, except I can't believe he'd keep on clicking on the link and in any event, a reasonable number of the searches are from international sources.

Anyway, I'd really like it if someone who finds this post by searching for that phrase could clear this up for me! Is this article being studied at schools/universities? Is there a book or something with that as the title? I've turned anonymous commenting back on so hopefully someone will be able to enlighten me...

Update: Problem solved! An anonymous commentor left this in the original post:

hey mate
I'm studying Comp Law and Policy at Deakin univsity. Believe it or not we have to do a compulsory assignment critiquing James' article, focusing on s 45 and 45A of the TPA. I'm citing your blog in mine - don't whether i'm supposed to or not.

I knew there was something!

Quote of the Week

2006-09-09T23:37:00.000+09:30

I realise that Queensland Premier Peter Beattie's "average bloke", "not a politician-politican" image is carefully managed/crafted by his PR team and amplified by the media reporting his actions through that prism but, still, this is a stylish way to celebrate an almost unprecedented election victory:

Tonight we're going to have a few drinks but tomorrow we're back to work.

And the Labor stranglehold on Australian State parliament's is secure for another month at least. It looks to be another landslide, too, with Labor barely losing any of the 60 (out of 89) seats it held after the last election and probably picking up some of the three seats it lost to the Liberals in recent by-elections. Much as I'm not a huge fan of many aspects of the current crop of centre-right state Labor administrations, you gotta admit that they all seem to have found pretty good formulae for winning elections.

(Moving) Picture of the Week

2006-09-09T22:25:00.000+09:30

Irwin's career in a parodic nutshell:

(Note, you might need the latest version of Flash player plugin if you don't see the above).

"Irwin": As we steer our boat down, looking for these dangerous predators... boy, there's a king croc right here. He must be four meters; 12, 13 feet long at least. This croc has enough power in its jaws to rip my head right off.

Kenny: (Oh, no!)

"Irwin": I've got to be careful. So, what I'm gonna do is sneak up on it and jam my thumb in its butthole.

(later)

"Irwin": Well! That was quite an angry croc! But I managed to escape with only a few bruises and a shattered left testicle. Next week we'll look for more of these beautiful creatures, so we can learn more about them by pissing them off immensely.

It's never surprised me that someone so blissfully unaware of concepts like irony and understatement found a more natural home in the US than in Australia. I do of course feel sadness at his passing, sympathy for his family, respect for his position on the world stage and appreciation for what he did to shine light on Australia's natural world. But in the end, he was more of an oddity than a "hero" from where I'm sitting.

As an aside, it's interesting that a number of commentors at Landeryou's blog agreed with Germaine Greer's general sentiments in this interview:

I'd encourage you to hear what she's saying, rather than what other people are saying about what she's saying cause what she's saying isn't that crazy (except for on two occasions when she got called out on some minor hyperbole and let herself get frustrated with the interviewer). Also interesting that Landeryou didn't actually try and rebut any of her substantive points in his accompanying commentary (calling her "owned" by the interviewer doesn't count). He instead chose to attack a random straw man ("Perhaps she'll have something bitchy to say about the fossil fuel use of the late Peter Brock") and some comments made by someone writing about Greer. Strange.

PS. Yes, I have just figured out how to steal youtube imbeds... I'll try to keep their use to a minimum.

Triple Jeopardy?

2006-09-07T14:14:00.000+09:30

I've never seen it, but I understand that the plot of the movie Double Jeopardy is something like this. Woman is framed for the murder of her husband. The framing is successful and she goes to jail. She later discovers that not only is she not guilty of the murder, she could not have been guilty because her husband is still alive and responsible for her being framed. Armed with her extensive knowledge of double jeopardy law she goes on a manhunt to kill her husband in revenge when she gets out of prison, safe in the knowledge that she can’t be prosecuted for the ‘same’ murder twice thanks to the double jeopardy rule.

If this were my only exposure to the rule, I would think it was pretty stupid. What’s the point of a legal rule which gives people leeway to commit crimes with no fear of being punished? Thankfully, as with so much popular understanding of legal theory the protagonist’s understanding of double jeopardy law in that movie is completely wrong. Double jeopardy only prohibits a person being tried for the same crime twice (The term ‘double jeopardy’ actually encompasses four distinct doctrines, but this is the most important one. If you really care about the other ones, feel free to ask). On no reading of the law could the murder which didn’t take place and the murder which the protagonist intends to commit be seen as the same crime. They would happen in different places and circumstances and at completely different times. Not to mention the fact that one would actually exist while the other wouldn't (ok, it's a film so neither would, but you know what I mean). What would happen, if the woman had ended up murdering the husband for real, is that she would receive an acquittal for the first crime which she didn’t commit and then be promptly charged for the new murder.

The double jeopardy rule is potentially topical in Australia at the moment. As far as I can see the biggest obstacle to the re-trial of Jack Thomas, who recently had his conviction for terrorism-related offences quashed by the Victorian Supreme court, is that it would be a violation of the Double Jeopardy rule. Thomas’ lawyer, unsurprisingly, seems to be aware of this and used the language of double jeopardy in his initial submissions opposing a retrial - ‘If ever a case called for finality, this one does.’ Sounds like a good enough excuse for me to run over the case for the double jeopardy rule.

The single most persuasive reason for the double jeopardy rule, in my opinion, is that it discourages sloppy policing. If the State could simply turn around and re-prosecute an acquitted person there would be no incentive for the police (or prosecutors) to do a decent job. Even if you limited this to circumstances where ‘new information’ came up it would still discourage a complete searching out of all available information. It might even encourage police to deliberately not expend resources pursuing certain leads, because if they get a conviction without doing so then they’ve saved themselves the resources and if they don’t get a conviction, they can then investigate that area and find out ‘new information’ necessary for a re-trial. Given the mental and physical strain involved in the trial process for witnesses, families/related parties and the accused themselves, as well as the cost to society of maintaining courts and prosecutors, anything which encourages police to get it right the first time is a good thing.

There’s a few other ‘practical’ justifications for the rule. The further from the events themselves that a trial occurs, the less reliable the existing evidence becomes. Physical evidence degrades, gets contaminated or gets lost and witness testimony becomes based less and less on memory and more and more on external sources. So if a new trial could be called every time some new piece of evidence came to light, the trial process would have an increasingly lower chance it has of reaching the correct factual outcome.

But practical justifications only get you so far. They provide the reason for having a general rule, but not for having extremely limited scope for granting exceptions to it. Most of the more abstract justifications for double jeopardy rely on an axiom that underpins Common Law criminal law tradition – ‘ it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent person suffer’. I’m not going to go into an extended defence of that maxim here, but the two chief justifications for it are (1) the vastly unequal power relationship and access to forensic/inquisitorial resources between the individual and the state in a criminal trial, (2) the asymmetry of harm done to an individual wrongly convicted compared to the harm to society of allowing a guilty person to be acquitted. So if you think of an innocent person who is wrongly accused of a crime, double jeopardy is an important safeguard in that it encourages police to only bring cases founded on solid evidence (because they don’t get a second bite at the cherry if they lose a weak case), it reduces the inevitable stigma associated with being constantly dragged before courts for the same crime and it eliminates the ability of the state to keep retrying the same issue time and time again until they find a sympathetic jury.

There’s other more abstract justifications for the rule. Double jeopardy gives accused criminals (whether guilty or innocent) finality in that the State isn’t permitted to hang a sword of Damocles over their heads for the rest of their lives. Relatedly (not a word), it greatly hampers the ability of the State to use perverse prosecution, with the associated social stigma, as a political weapon against innocent but unpopular defendants. Double jeopardy also upholds juries’ traditional right to give ‘peverse’, against the fact or mercy verdicts which a the citizens’ final line of defence against truly obscene laws.

The reason for the title of this post is that England essentially abolished Double Jeopardy in a 2003 Act and replaced it with ‘triple jeopardy’, in that individuals can be tried for the same serious time twice provided ‘new and compelling evidence’ and public interests tests are satisfied. They still can’t be tried a third time, though. I think this aspect of this Act (and many others) goes much too far. On the specifics of the law, the presumption of innocence is essentially neutered if a jury is looking at a person whom a court of appeal has determined there to be ‘compelling’ evidence of guilt as they must do so for a person on their second trial. Further, the arguments relating to sloppy police work seem particularly applicable to the English situation, where police corruption and ineptitude in the prosecution of crimes (eg. the murder of Stephen Lawrence) somehow lead to calls for the abolishment of a rule which gives police strong incentives to do their job right the first time.

I do actually support some tinkering at the edges of the rule, especially in regards to trials where the accused is found to have committed a perversion of justice type offence and trials for collateral crimes such as perjury. But I’m glad that double jeopardy isn’t seriously in jeopardy in Australia, at the moment. It isn’t one of our two and a half (weak) constitutional rights, however, so it could be overturned at any time by a government determined to do so. There was some indication that it would be neutered following public outcry at the Carroll decision (where the High Court took a ridiculously strict position on a collateral double jeopardy rule that NZ, UK and, previously, Queensland courts had opposed on straight common law grounds), but it seems the Labor Attorney generals managed to restrain their authoritarian impulses in this instance, which has to be something of a first.

Many Happy Tax Returns

2006-08-29T12:09:00.000+09:30

I wrote an essay on tax policy earlier in the year in which I argued for an abolishment of mandatory self-assessment (filling out a tax return) accompanied by a general simplification of tax laws and better tax administration. One of the comments I got back from my lecturer was that it would be electorally unpopular because, among other reasons, Australians like receiving tax returns. And she's right. Whether it's a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand dollars, people (including myself) really do enjoy getting a lump sum back from the tax office a few months after the end of each financial year (depending on how slack they are in getting their forms in).

If you think about it, this response is completely batty. The current system of tax overpayment and then delayed returns makes people financially worse off. For one, people not have use of this money throughout the year and people value present consumption more than future consumption (see: credit cards). Additionally, individuals do not get a chance to save or invest this money and receive interests or other returns on it. So why do people seem to be so irrational and like a system which makes them financially worse off?

Well, I don't really know, but I've got a few ideas. The most common reason that people say they like getting a lump sum tax return back is that it's like compulsory saving. This idea that people would like to save more money than they do but are unable to control themselves in the short term to do so is anathema to economists who assume that people are rational calculating machines, but it's a common experience. That's why government programs like compulsory super-annuation payments can make people better off even though it's restricting their choices.

Another reason is probably that most people simply don't notice, say, a $20/week average tax overpyament but they certainly notice it when they receive a $1,000 lump sum in August. The former figure is not mentally salient and so doesn't register in our mental accounting, while the latter does. The former doesn't significantly decrease our subjective wellbeing (even though it makes us financially worse off) but the latter increases it.

This idea is relevant to a policy much favoured by tax economists but which is seen as political suicide by those who decide these sorts of thigns - tax indexation. As you might be aware, the government in effect sits over a large and mostly hidden income tax increase every year as incomes rise in line with inflation. Even if no one in the economy is actually getting a net salary increase (over and above what inflation robs them) income taxes rise as a greater percentage of people's income moves into higher tax brackets. This does not require people to actually cross into a new tax bracket, a nominal rise in income will always increase the proportion of a person's income which is taxed at a higher rate (assuming they earn enough to be in two tax brackets).

Anyway, economists don't like this hidden tax. They think that governments should be honest about their tax increases so that people can better evaluate tax policy. To this end, they suggest that the level at which each tax bracket cuts in should rise every year in line with inflation. The problem with this is that governments would no longer be able to give fiscally pain-free "tax cuts" by refunding people's hidden tax increase back to them in highly publicised "you'll be $15/week better off!!" budget measures. In contrast, the tax saving that people receive from tax indexation would be entirely hidden, especially given how little the underlying concept of fiscal drag is understood (eg. many people think that "bracket creep" is only an issue if you move from one tax bracket to the next).

Now, this may be an argument for educating people more about tax policy. But I actually think that even if people know about the underlying irrationality of their preferences, they still would prefer a regular tax cut to an indexation of brackets in the same way that people who understand that receiving a lump sum tax return shouldn't make them happy still enjoy receiving one. Humans are funny creatures, but our quirks should be taken into account and not assumed away when making economic policy.

Laughably Inaccurate

2006-08-26T15:17:00.000+09:30

About a year ago I wrote a post explaining why I think the sections of Victoria's Racial and Religious Tolerance Act which prohibit fairly wide classes of speech are, by and large, a bad idea. As I explained previously, the speech that they seek to prohibit may well be extremely distasteful and possibly even harmful, but these considerations aren't enough to override the general justifications for freedom of speech. Specifically, vilification laws such as these are likely to increase the harm caused by the speech by publicising it to a wider audience and creating "martyrs" out of those prosecuted under them. Freedom of speech isn't an absolute right, but placing a test of "reasonableness" on controversial speech, as Victoria's vilification Act does, is going too far. These laws are back in the news because the two pasters - Daniel Scot and Danny Nalliah of Catch the Fire ministry - who were found to have vilified Muslims are currently arguing their appeal before the Victorian Supreme Court.

In taking this position I unfortunately find myself in bed with right wing scare-mongers such as LGF and Bolt. What annoys me is not that I agree with these sorts of people, but that they seem to find it necessary to either mis-characterise the breadth of the law as ridiculously wide ("thoughtcrime", "Sharia Law by Stealth") or mis-characterise the actions of Scot and Nalliah as ridiculously trivial. Take Bolt's latest tirade which is chock-full of inaccuracies, selective quoting and what I can only assume is a deliberate failure to tell the whole story. I realise this is par for the course for Bolt, but gets to me in this case because (a) I agree with his conclusion and (b) the implication of his arguments that these laws are wrong because they prohibit reasonable speech is that similar laws (eg. against Muslim groups) could be jusitified if only they were applied to unreasonable speech which Bolt doesn't like.

But he's wrong. The pastor's conduct wasn't reasonable and thus should be protected speech, it was unreasonable but still should be protected. Just to set the mood, here is my previous summary of what Scot and Nalliah presented at the conference which was the subject of the vilification trial. The underlying theme of the conference was that Australian Muslims were engaged in a process of 'silent Jihad' which involved:

Deception of the majority non-Muslim population as to the peaceful nature of Islam. This deception would only be revealed when the Muslim population gained sufficient strength.

Bribing people with up to $10,000 to convert.

Aiming to obtain Muslim numerical majority in Australia at which stage the non-Muslim minority would be forced to convert or leave the country.

This numerical majority was being achieved through the high birthing practices of Muslims, with respect to non-Muslim Australians, and through immigration. The latter situation was accelerated through the current Islamic 'control' over the immigration department and ‘infiltration’ of parliament.

At this stage those that would not convert would have to pay a punitive 'poll tax' (jizya) or have their head cut off.

Muslims were to be encouraged to participate in this by the promise of looting the material possessions of non-believers, as well as threats of divine damnation.

The judge found that these statements were not made in good faith (which is part of a defence to a finding of vilification under the act) for the following reasons:

Their agreement with a statement put to them that most Australian 'Muslims were peaceful, decent God-fearing, honest citizens', in contrast to the views expressed at the conference

The presentation of 'silent Jihad' with little relevant evidence and without distinguishing between different groups of Muslims

The use of the unusual ‘Pickthall’ translation of the Qur’an where it had stronger language

The exaggerated paraphrasing of certain passages of the Qur'an where it was claimed they were being directly quoted

Scot’s use of the name 'Son of Ahmed Siddiqui' (his birth name) in literature distributed at the conference to give the impression it was written by an independent Muslim when he hadn't gone by that name since 1971

The mis-attributing of statistics to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the incorrect mathematics used to describe Muslim growth rates

Out-of-context quoting of the Qur’an, such as reading vs 38, 40 and 41 of one passage while leaving out vs 39 which would have made the passage seem less extreme

Citing a figure on the number of verses in the Qur'an which spoke of Jihad which was highly misleading (the figure included, for example, verses on the punishment for murder)

An admission that he should not have asserted that Muslims 'control' the immigration department, he claimed he should have used the word 'influence'

Misleading and evasive testimony at trial

He laid out extensive (and tedious) evidence for these findings and they seemed to be justified on the facts presented. Bear in mind that these summaries were based exclusively on my reading of the 110-page judgement and formed the actual reasons for the findings made by the judge in that case. Just to emphasise that I am not mis-characterising the judge's findings, I quote his summary of his reasons for a finding of vilification:

Pastor Scot, during the course of the seminar, made statements -

(1) that the Qur'an promotes violence, killing and looting;

(2) that it treats women badly; they are to be treated like a field to plough, "use her as you wish". Further, in Hadith Bukhari, women, dog and donkey are of equal value;

(3) that domestic violence in general is encouraged;

(4) that Muslims are liars;

(5) that Allah is not merciful and a thief's hand is cut off for stealing;

(6) that Muslims are demons;

(7) the practice of abrogation that is cancellation of words from the Qur'an and the Hadith solely to fit some particular purpose or personal need;

(8) that Muslims operate a silent six jihad, which is the use of business connections; using money to induce people to convert to Islam, and the training of Muslins in Madrassihs and the statement there are millions of people right now under training in these schools, implying a threat to Australia;

(9) that Muslims have a plan to overrun western democracy by the use of violence and terror, and to replace those democracies with oppressive regimes;

(10) that people study for six to seven years and they become true Muslims, and we call them terrorists, but they are true Muslim; they have read the Qur'an, they have understood it and they are now practising it, that is the connection between the Qur'an and terrorism;

(11) Muslims intend to take over Australia and declare it as an Islamic nation;

(12) Muslim people have to fight Christians and Jews, humiliate them and fight them until they accept true religion;

(13) Muslims in Australia are increasing at substantial rates and have influence or control over the migration of people to Australia. Figures are quoted which are wrong. It is said the figures are produced by the Bureau, implying the Bureau of Statistics, whereas they came from a different source, and that they are increasing at a rate which was incorrect.

It is obvious that Bolt and I are reading the same document, but Bolts seems to be reading it with his bizzaro-world glasses on. From his most recent piece:

But by now you must think these two pastors surely said something especially wicked to have been silenced so completely. Maybe Mortimer [lawyer for the Islamic Council of Victoria] is on the side of justice.

All right, I won't hide from you the sordid truth.

With a setup like that, you just know where he's going.

VCAT's Justice Michael Higgins in December ruled that Scot in particular had broken the Government's vilification laws by quoting the Koran in a way that got "a response from the audience at various times in the form of laughter".
...
In his judgment, Higgins listed 13 examples of how Scot had "made fun of Muslim beliefs and conduct".

That is a surreal mis-reading of the judgement of Lynch-ian proportions. The passage Bolt is referring to is this:

Pastor Scot, throughout the seminar, made fun of Muslim beliefs and a conduct. It was done, not in the context of a serious discussion of Muslims' religious beliefs; it was presented in a way which is essentially hostile, demeaning and derogatory of all Muslim people, their god, Allah, the prophet Mohammed and in general Muslim religious beliefs and practices.

Time and again this occurs and, on any view, produces a response from the audience at various times in the form of laughter.

This is followed by "Pastor Scot, during the course of the seminar, made statements - " and the 13 statements extracted above. The judge was not, on any possible reading of the evidence, saying that Scot had caused his audience to laugh at those 13 statements. I don't even know how it would be possible to make a joke about "Muslims have a plan to overrun western democracy by the use of violence and terror, and to replace those democracies with oppressive regimes". The passage Bolt is referring to is contained in the judge's summary of the case. In this summary, he first paints (in prose) an overview of the atmosphere at the seminar. At the end of that overview, he makes the above mention of laughter. And then he itemises (in dot point), more specifically, the facts on which he based his finding of vilification. It is beyond ridiculous to suggest that this finding was based on Scot causing his audience to "laugh" at the above 13 points, as Bolt does. The sorts of things the audience was laughing at was this:

As an example, it is stated that Allah has 99 names and the Hadith "tells us Allah has actually hundred names, but the hundredth name is not known to Muslim people, that's only known to a camel. So you have to inquiry from a camel to find out the hundredth name".

Not "Muslim people have to fight Christians and Jews, humiliate them and fight them until they accept true religion". The problem that Higgins J Identified with the above 13 points, presented in bad faith, was not that they "made fun of Muslim beliefs and conduct" as Bolt suggests. It was that they inspired hatred, serious contempt for, revulsion and fear about Australian Muslims. It might seem I'm making a mountain out of a molehill here, but Bolt's central argument – in a piece entitled 'A Very Scary Laugh' – is that Scot and Nalliah went down simply because they made a bunch of Christians laugh and that this is a 'dangerous' thing to society. That argument is as absurd as it sounds.

Anyway, to continue with Bolt's claims:

In his judgment, Higgins listed 13 examples of how Scot had "made fun of Muslim beliefs and conduct". And here is where this case gets surreal: at least eight of them involve Scot quoting the Koran -- and, I believe, quoting it accurately.
It's true, the Koran does indeed say men may "beat" their wives. It does indeed urge believers to "kill disbelievers where you find them". It really does call for thieves to have a hand chopped off.
Scot may have spoken too luridly for my taste and yours, but Higgins did not identify anything he said that was actually false, other than an immigration statistic. Oh, and Scot failed to quote a Koranic verse that said Allah actually was merciful, so there.

The eight he's talking about are, presumably, points 1-5, 7, 10 and 12 above. There's a number of things, er, missing from Bolt's summary here. For instance Scot did indeed get into trouble for not pointing out a verse saying that Allah was merciful. The context for this was Scot attempting to paint Allah as an unmerciful god (in an unfavourable comparison with Jesus). To support his argument, Scot read out 2 verses from Chapter 5 of the Qur'an. The relevant verses read something like:

Guess which two verses Scot read out? Hint: 39 wasn't one of them. His response to the court was that he didn't have time (para 251 of the judgement).

But more importantly, Bolt fails to mention the reason why even Scot's accurate quoting of verses from the Qur'an were held to be vilification. The problem was not the quoting of the verses, it was the use of these verses to argue that they reflected the way Australian Muslims lived in the 21st century. Scot argued that every verse he quoted or misquoted, was applied literally by Australian Muslims.

To see why this might be a problem, I'll quote some Bible verses (King James Translation). Leviticus 24:16:

And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.

Leviticus 21:9

And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.

Applied in Genesis 38:24

And it came to pass about three months after, that it was told Judah, saying, Tamar thy daughter in law hath played the harlot; and also, behold, she is with child by whoredom. And Judah said, Bring her forth, and let her be burnt.

Genesis 22, various verses:

And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.

And I could easily go on, and on. Numbers 31 and Deuteronomy 13 are particularly juicy, especially if you consider that the war crime in Numbers 31 was inspired by some Israelites sleeping with Midianite women.

Anyway, imagine a Muslim preacher getting up in an Islamic country with a small, marginalised and poorly understood Christian or Jewish minority and using these verses to say that this is how Christians and Jews live their lives. They stone those who don't believe in their religion to death when they get the chance, they regularly burn people at the stake as punishment and they sacrifice their children.

Now there's some factual problems here, given that the burning punishment was 'merely' a branding and Moses wasn't actually required to sacrifice Isaac, but the fundamental problem is the taking of historical passages used, if at all, by modern practitioners of the religion to teach very abstract lessens (eg. God doesn't tolerate sin) and inciting fear and revulsion in the audience by arguing that this is how these people actually live their lives. In essence, that's what Scot and Nalliah did and that's why they were found to have vilified Australian Muslims even though some of the conduct establishing that vilification was 'merely' quoting the Qur'an. Indeed Bolt seems to acknowledge this:

Higgins found Scot erred because he "failed to differentiate between Muslims throughout the world (and) preached a literal translation of the Koran and of Muslims' religious practices that was not mainstream".
And perhaps he's right. Perhaps he knows better than does Scot, who was born in Pakistan and has studied the Koran for years, what is mainstream Islamic teaching and what is not.

The trouble with Bolt's appeal to the authoritative knowledge of Scot is that, in contrast to what he presented at the conference, Scot acknowledged at trial that he believed that most Australian Muslims 'were peaceful, decent God-fearing, honest citizens'. So Scot did realise that the 'Silent Jihad' thesis he was promoting at the conference wasn't mainstream (to say the least), but he presented it as such in a manner which calculated to inspire fear, hatred and revulsion in an audience which had turned up to a seminar entitled 'Insight into Islam'.

Like I said, I believe these vilification laws are bad public policy. But Bolt and other supporters of Catch the Fire do themselves no favours by mis-characterising what was said at the seminar, whether wilfully or through ignorance. What Scot and Nalliah presented at the conference and in associated papers was outrageous and not in any way calculated to give their audience a balanced impression of Muslims living in Australia. Their speech should be condemned in the strongest possible terms but the best response to it more speech, not laws which will make them 'martyrs' in the eyes of those inclined to believe what they say.

Picture of the Week

2006-08-22T11:56:00.000+09:30

I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, but I do like a good Ad-Bust:

Source: Me and my phone, which explains the shoddy quality. Original design here.

Quote of the Week

2006-08-22T11:37:00.000+09:30

The Supreme Court of Victoria released a summary of their reasons for quashing the conviction of Jack Thomas, the first person convicted in Australia under the Commonwealth's post-September 11 anti-terrorist laws. The reason the conviction was quashed was because the evidence on which it was based was coerced from the accused, as they note:

The applicant was explicitly proffered by the Pakistani officials the possibility of returning to his family on the one hand and a very different fate on the other. The Australians present made no attempt to distance themselves from this position but impliedly endorsed it.

That has to be in contention for understatement of the year. From Jack's evidence of his interrogation, which the court accepted:

Joe kept insisting that I knew the next operation or next target and I kept insisting I did not get involved in that kind of discussion, and had no knowledge of such things. He wasn’t believing me so he was ratcheting up the pressure. He said I would be sent back over the border into Afghanistan, where the latest technique to extract information was twisting testicles. ‘I love to hear the sound’, he said, ‘-‘when they twist their testicles. They just scream.’ He said the guards would not treat me like that here. I would be bashed and beaten every day. He said: ‘You’re just going to have to prove it once you get there.’ I felt sure I was being sent there and no matter what I said wouldn’t console him. I just got to a stage when I broke down because of what he was saying, especially about my wife and sending agents to Australia to rape my wife.

You know, I think I'd say all sorts of things if they were my choices. I think it's an unequivocably good thing that evidence obtained under these circumstances isn't seen as reliable enough to support a conviction in our legal system. No matter how bad a person the accused may appear to be, if the prosecution doesn't have reliable evidence that the crime has been committed then our courts shouldn't allow a conviction to stand. It's also good that the court hasn't closed the door on the prosecution's case, apparently leaving open the prospect of a re-trial based on what seems to be a more reliable confession - though I must admit my knowledge of the double jeopardy rule leads me to question whether this is a likely prospect.

Petrol Blogging Pt III

2006-08-21T13:07:00.000+09:30

For whatever reason, the petrol price debate is the only issue which I feel like I have something meaningful to comment on in the last couple of weeks. It seems a relatively trivial topic to continually blog on in the light of various terror alerts and Middle Eastern wars (of the anti-terrorist and civil varieties), but I simply feel I don't have much to add to the discussion of those issues which is why I don't bother trying. Anyway, here's petrol post #3, and the last in a while I promise!

Economists tend to get a bit of flack from natural scientists when they call their discipline a science. Some of this criticism is fair (especially with regards to the pseudo-scientific mathematics fetishised by modern economists), but fairly often economics presents testable conclusions, based on reasonable and necessary assumptions about the real world in a way which at least justifies the label "social" science. An article by Paul Higgins in the Age last week is a good example (as an aside, he's described as a "futurist" which sounds like a seriously cool job):

AT RECENT conferences on the future of biofuels, I have offered a $10 bet to anyone in the room that the West Texas intermediate oil price will be less than US$40 a barrel within three years. So far only three people have taken up the bet.

My view that the oil price will fall to this level by 2009 may seem ridiculous given the hysteria in the media on rising oil and petrol prices. Some commentators regard ongoing rises in oil prices as a fait accompli. However, a logical analysis of the forces driving oil prices creates an extremely plausible scenario in which oil prices will fall significantly.
...
The only caveat to my scenario is if we have reached peak oil production — the point where we can no longer increase the amount of oil that is produced annually.

A range of views place peak oil production somewhere between 2005-2036. Once we reach peak oil, then there will be a crunch in oil supply and price that makes current pricing look like a picnic, and my money is already on the table.

His basic argument is entirely reasonable. Supply and demand for oil are highly resistent to change in the short run, so the price of oil is characterised by regular price spikes when supply/demand get slightly out of sync due to something like a middle east war, major refinery downtime or a sudden increase in demand. Because supply is slow to increase significantly (involving a process of exploration, development, extraction and refining) and demand is slow to reduce (eg. purchase of more efficent vehicles) in response to price rises, price spikes are an expected feature of the oil market.

As he notes, for supply to increase and reduce prices it must be possible for more oil to be produced, so the theory breaks down if we are at Hubbert's Peak (peak oil production). This creates a difficulty, because only hindsight lets you conclusively see if this point has been reached. Hence the necessity of making an assumption in making this sort of economic analysis. It doesn't make the analysis any less scientific, it's simply a result of working in a field where the underlying parameters are inherently uncertain.

On a diferent track, The Age's economics editor, Tim Colebatch, wrote a strangely incoherent piece on the petrol price issue last week. After discussing the LPG subsidy and other measures to deal with the situation announced by the government last week, he noted:

Just as important, however, was what the PM did not do. He did not decouple Australia from global oil prices, which have pushed petrol prices up by 63 per cent in four years. And he did not cut taxes on petrol, whereas in 2000-01, he made cuts that have reduced today's prices by 15 cents a litre.

Thank God he didn't. You do people no favours by making it cheaper for them to use up a product in short supply. It encourages us, when making investments, to assume that the product will remain cheap, when it can't.

Those cuts to petrol taxes in 2000-01 encouraged Australian buyers to invest in fuel-inefficient vehicles such as big 4WDs. They encouraged our manufacturers to keep producing fuel-inefficient cars. Both would be better off now had the Government left taxes alone, and allowed the scarcity of oil to be reflected in its price.

The voters are right: rising petrol prices are driven by global supply and demand, from which no Government can shield us. As Howard put it, it's the result of surging demand for oil from China and India, and decades of under-investment in oil refining.

It could be because the length of newspaper opinion pieces are tightly constrained, but there's an apparent flaw in this logic - the current price of petrol doesn't simply represent its scarcity, a not insignificant component of it is a specific government excise. Now, I've made the case that this sort of tax is economically and socially justified on environmental grounds, but Colebatch doesn't even mention that factor. He seems to be saying that the natural price of petrol (the price which reflects its scarcity) includes the proportion which is due to the excise tax, which is simply not correct. If it weren't for the aforementioned environmental reasons, there would be a much stronger case for the government cutting the excise tax.

The article also veers off track when Colebatch expresses concern about the anti-competitive effect of the supermarket petrol price dockets. The concern is that Coles/Safeway use their supermarket business to subsidise their petrol wings in the hope of putting independent petrol retailers out of business, at which time they can raise their prices (a classic predatory pricing argument). This concern is not coincidentally raised most often by independent petrol retailers and is considered wrong by the ACCC. But even if it were correct, as Colebatch seems to be implying, getting worried over anti-competitive price rises seems strangely inconsistent with his instruction not to get worried about tax induced price rises. If it's a good thing that petrol prices are artificially high, because it reflects the underlying scarcity of the product, why should it matter if the government or private sector is responsible for those price rises? There might be a case to be made that the government would spend extra revenue better than the private sector in this area (although, given the amount of exploration money the government gives oil companies that might seem a strange argument), but that's an argument Colebatch doesn't even begin to address. He just seems to ignore the apparent inconsistency in arguing that government price rises = good, private price rises = bad.

Commenting Change

2006-08-18T14:53:00.000+09:30

Thanks to an anonymous idiot provocateur, I've had to turn off anonymous comments for the time being. I have no problem with people dissenting but what I've been getting isn't dissent it's the sort of thing that people/employers googling my name will have serious questions as to why I'd allow that sort of thing to remain on my personal web site. The personal responsible for this will no doubt gain great pleasure from this move, but I'm willing to give him his pathetic kicks.

Silly Subsidy

2006-08-14T13:47:00.000+09:30

...And, one weak later, Howard looks like he's going to break and cave in to popular discontent on fuel prices with an expensive an ill-conceived subsidy on LPG conversion:

The Prime Minister is today expected to announce subsidies to encourage people to convert their cars from petrol to LPG.
...
But John Howard is set to announce a $1,000 subsidy for motorists to convert to LPG.

The package is also likely to include incentives for petrol stations to install enough LPG tanks to cope with increased demand.

That he apparently stole the policy from Labor is no indication of its desirability.

I argued in my previous post that measures to artificially reduce fuel prices might be superficially attractive but a bad idea because rising prices force people to take into account the true social cost of petrol consumption, primarily greenhouse gasses. Additionally these higher prices will spur the development of alternative fuels which is the only long term solution to a price situation which is fundamentally related to a mismatch of demand and supply of oil as India/China (among others) accelerate their economic growth.

Anyway, that's the argument with respect to petrol and it isn't much different as far as LPG gas goes. It turns out that burning LPG emits less greenhouse gasses per litre than normal petrol, 1.6kg/l compared to 2.5kg/l according to this handy government site. But you have to take into account the fact that LPG engines are less fuel efficient, by approximately 30% according to a RACQ pamphlet. Plugging those numbers into the emissions calculator on the government site I just linked tells me that a car running on LPG emits approximately 15% less carbon dioxide than a standard petrol car.

Now, that's a good thing, no doubt. It also provides an argument for prefferential tax or subsidy treatment of LPG gas on environmental and economic grounds. So what's the problem with this new subsidy? There is already extremely preferential tax treatment of LPG fuel. There is currently no federal excise tax on LPG, which is equivalent (if I read this correctly) to $.125/l or about 25% of the cost of the fuel (if it's at $.45/l). The cynic in me says that the fact that we are almost entirely LPG self-sufficient is probably the true reason for this subsidey, not environmental reasons, but that's neither here nor there. The latest subsidy was actually due to be implemented in 2011 when this concessional excise treatment was to be phased out, but now that it's been brought forward it seems pretty clear that the combination of concession and subsidy is far disproportionate to any environmental benefit flowing from having cars run on LPG.

I think the fact that the environmental arguments aren't even being mentioned in the selling of this subsidy is evidence that they aren't seen as a genuine consideration by the government. Good politics? Probably. Good policy? Not a chance.

Conserving Collusion

2006-08-07T10:40:00.000+09:30

According to the PM, the price of petrol is Australian's biggest economic concern and the issue of most worry to him at the moment. Now, I might dispute its status as #1 most concerning issue at the moment, but recent rises in the price of petrol are certainly causing problems for the economy and the community. Petrol price rises have inflationay effects as higher transport costs translate into higher end prices for goods. Increasing pump prices also can have unfortunate regressive effects, with those not able to afford an inner city dwelling (where there are more public transport options and shorter travel distances to places of work/entertainment) or a newer, more fuel efficient, car feeling the price rise more than those more able to absorb it. But, nevertheless, I'm glad that the bipartisan consensus against cutting the petrol excise is holding for the moment.

The reason I don't support such measures to cut the price of petrol is that the market doesn't price petrol efficiently. In a perfect market, petrol would be too cheap relative to the social cost of fuel usage. Those extra costs in the form of greenhouse and other (smog, sulphur) pollution would still be borne by society, it's just that petrol users wouldn't pay for them. Futher, you might place some cost on the fact that petrol consumption represents the diminishment of an irreplaceable resource, depending on how much value you place on the ability of future generations to have access to hydrocarbons. By forcing people to pay for some of these otherwise uncosted detriments, the petrol excise encourages people to use less fuel and to do so in a more efficient manner, where possible.

A rough example of this is a 2002 Howard government policy which required imported fuel to meet a higher environmental standard than it previously had. Unfortunately the Age article doesn't elaborate on the content of the standard (and Googling it doesn't help... believe it or not most green groups don't focus very much on positive measures coming from our current government) but I seem to remember at the time that an indepenent fuel chain had found a high-sulphur/low cost supplier from china. This fuel was much worse for the environment than other fuels (one of the reasons it was cheaper) and the new standard meant it could no longer be imported. The ACCC recently revealed that this alone has added $.02-.03 to the price of petrol. With this policy, the government effectively put a price tag on the cost of the now-avoided environmental regulation - a price we were previously paying, but in a degraded environment rather than in pump prices.

Another interesting angle on petrol prices is the persistent claims that there is collusion in the retail market which drives up prices. For the moment, I'll assume that the ACCC's findings are wrong on this issue and that this sort of collusion is happening. Is this a bad thing? Normally economists would say yes. Colluding to raise prices results in higher profits for existing business, but creates inefficiencies in the market because some people who would be willing to pay more than the cost of production are priced out of the market.

But there's a twist on this analysis when you're talking about a product, like petrol, which has uncosted detriments to society like pollution. In this situation, the cost of production doesn't reflect the true social cost of using the good and so the efficient price level is correspondingly higher. Collusion between market players could conceivably drive prices to this higher level which is economically efficient. Of course, it's possible that it could drive them too high, but that's not necessarily the case. It's collusion for conservation, price fixing for pollution reduction, consumer-harming self interest that can save the environment. Somehow I can't see green groups campaigning for it, but it's an interesting idea anyway.

Picture of the Week

2006-08-05T21:10:00.000+09:30

Ever wondered what would happen if you put a digital camera on long exposure, hit the "take" button and threw it in the air? Wonder no more:

(Source El Ray)

Many more interesting photos here. It feels weird to call such surreal pictures photos and not "images".

Quote of the Week

2006-08-05T07:33:00.000+09:30

Terry Lane, an Age journalist, recently disgraced himself by repeating a story about Jesse Macbeth, someone who claimed that he was a US soldier who had been attached to a US death squad in Iraq which went around comitting war crimes with the aim of striking fear into the heart of Iraqis. This story was exposed as a hoax over two months ago but Terry had obviously ran across an old story on the internet which hadn't got around to retracting it (as, for example, Socialist Alternative did with a Macbeth interview they had posted).

The Age Editor, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to reject Terry Lane's resignation. You might think this was because Terry Lane had offered some plausible reason for why he had printed such an inflammatory hoax story, but his explanation actually made him look worse from where I'm sitting:

Journalists are supposed to be professionally sceptical and I am so ashamed I believed the Jesse Macbeth video and the reason I did that was because I wanted to believe what it said.

If I didn't know the source, I'd think that last line was some sort of bad parody of the "blame America first" left. That he admits that he actually wants to believe that America is sending out death squads with the express aim of torturing Iraqis and striking fear into the heart of the countries citizens is bad enough. That he has so little respect for any sort of journalistic ideals (objectivity, checking sources, neutral point of view) that his bizzare personal desire to paint America in such a bad light translates into uncritical printing of this sort of hoax further destroys any shred of respect he could still command. And that the Age's editor doesn't think this is a good enough reason to take him off his payroll doesn't completely destroy my respect for the paper, but it sure dints it a bit.

Hezbollah's Coup

2006-08-03T00:19:00.000+09:30

I've been shaken out of my blogging hiatus by an insightful perspective that I recently ran across on the current meltdown in the middle east, by a person writing under the name Lebanese.Profile for the Lebanese Political Journal blog. This person describes himself as a moderate who is "battered for fraternizing with Israelis" and "assaulted for having friends who actively support Hezbollah" who is "doing my best to navigate and find a solution" in the complex mess that is the Lebanese political and social situation. That post just linked worth reading for an insight into the contradictions that arise from some of the dogmatic positions in the country, but more immediately relevant is his analysis of the outcome of the current Israeli campaign:

Israel is asking Lebanese to turn against Hezbollah. You know, we were already against Hezbollah. Anybody who's read a Lebanese newspaper in the last two years would know that. We were even more vocal in our opposition to Hezbollah during the first two days of the conflict. Many Hezbollah supporters considered turning against their party then.

No one is talking like that any more.

Hezbollah has already declared that it's won this battle. In fact, it has. Because Israel is not going to stick around to clean up the damage. Hezbollah comes out of this more powerful than ever before. They've effectively mounted a coup using Israel to assassinate the government, since Syria was so ineffective in doing so. They're so sure they've won that they've already threatened every Lebanese who spoke out against them during the first few days of this conflict.

The post is (as he admits) a rant inspired by the Qana attack - which was still shocking despite the downwardly revised death toll - but it contains a core of truth. Lebanon was on a constructive path before the recent conflict. It wasn't at a point where you'd call it a healthy democracy, given its heavily rigged voting system and the strongly sectarian nature of its politics, but it was moving there. It was on its way to becoming the first Arab democracy in the middle east and it was doing it in response to internal pressures. The Assassination of Rafik Hariri last year Catalysed local resistance to Syrias' unhelpful influence and that pressure, along with a concerted international diplomatic effort spearheaded by France and the US, saw a formal Syrian withdrawal. Relatively free elections followed and things were moving ahead on the domestic front.

These attacks, as Totten points out, pretty well demolish the theory that democracies don't go to war with each other. Whatever you thought of the Afghanistan or Iraq invasions, those two countries were run by barbaric totalitarian regimes before international intervention and so the arguments about those interventions are of a different nature. Lebanon was not a dysfunctional or failed state. It had been, but it was moving towards being a responsible international citizen in a region where that is all too rare.

It is this fact which should have informed Israel's response to the unjustified attacks across internationally recognised borders by Hezbollah. Unlike in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has a potential a partner to work with in Lebanon - the Lebanese government (not to mention the UN which has an interim force in the area). These bodies are manifestly ineffective at times, so Israel is clearly justified in taking some direct action against Hezbollah in response to incursions. But, to paraphrase Siegman, what Israel has a right to do it has a habit of overdoing and "overdone" is the kindest way to describe the current attacks.

In its widespread campaign against Shiite population centres across Lebanon, including the south of Beiruit and much of the south of the country, Israel seems to have ignored the fact that it is drastically reducing the ability of the Lebanese government or other bodies to become partners in securing its borders. This isn't in the best interests of anyone, let alone Israel itself. Israel is rapidly backing itself into a corner where its only viable long term prospect is re-occupation of Southern Lebanon and further involvement in an escalating cycle of violence and bloody guerilla warfare.

The Jungle: A Terrible Regulator

2006-07-15T11:41:00.000+09:30

I've spent the last few weeks working in a competition law department of a law firm, so while the issue is fresh in my mind I thought I'd address a spectacularly ill-informed article by a libertarian wannabe that appeared in the Australian late last year. It was entitled "Law of the Jungle is the Best Regulator" and used a motley collection of bombastic statements to argue for the abolishment of the Trade Practices Act, which regulates (among other things) anti-competitive behaviour in Australia:

THE Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has announced that it is taking action against Australia's third-richest man, Richard Pratt, and his company, Visy Industries, for engaging in cartel behaviour (price fixing and market sharing) with competitor Amcor in the corrugated fibreboard container business. The $427 million penalty sought against Pratt and Visy is the largest in the history of Australian trade practices regulation.
...
Cartel behaviour is not evil and it should not be outlawed. For that matter, we should not even have such a thing as competition law or a Trade Practices Act. We should do away with fancy concepts such as price fixing, cartels and anti-competitive behaviour, and instead appreciate the conduct for what it is: business.

The writer, James, seems to belong to the school of thought which takes "government regulation = bad" as an article of faith, ignoring the wealth of orthodox, neo-liberal economic theory and empirical evidence which demonstrates otherwise. People in James' school of though usually rely on fallacies to support their argument. He uses a few common ones. Fallacy #1:

The underlying rationale for having competition laws is to protect consumers.

This is either wilful deception or astonishing ignorance. The purpose of competition laws is to improve efficiency. The basic justification for the free market (for normal people) is utilitarian. I say normal people, because there's a gruop of people who religiously worship deregulation as a good in itself. In a free market, in certain circumstances, unregulated business will produce the greatest output per unit input which economics treats as a good thing thanks to the basic economic concept of scarcity - people's material wants can never be satisfied, so we need to produce as efficiently as possible so that we can get as close as possible to satisfying said wants.

However, there's many situations where a business acting in their own self interest will not deliver this efficient outcome. Lets say the government grants a licence to one company saying that it's the only one able to produce a certain product. The private profit making decision will no longer produce the socially desirable outcome. This monopoly supplier can increase their profits by raising prices well above the total cost of production. From a social perspective, this is bad (inefficient). There will be people in the marketplace who want to buy the product at an amount less than the sale price, though at a price which would still cover the social cost of producing the product. Thus consumers are hurt by the monopoly. Businesses other than the monopolist (which would undercut its profits by cutting prices) would like to supply these people. Thus, the business sector is also hurt by the monopoly. In this way monopolies create what is known to economists as a dead weight loss. Reducing this dead weight loss increases social welfare. Importantly, this welfare increase is divided between the business and consumer sectors. The assertion that pro-competition laws only benefit consumers is simply wrong.

This dead weight loss doesn't only arise in the pure monopoly example I gave there. That is simply where it is the highest. Any market arrangement which results in prices being consistently above the total cost of production creates social inefficiency losses. Sometimes the cost of preventing such prices arising is greater than the dead weight loss, but there are useful steps that government can takes to prevent the worst situations arising or mitigate their negative effects. Thus, the Trade Practices Act regulates price fixing, market sharing, supply boycotting, horizontal and vertical mergers, among other things. These activities either clearly or potentially reduce total social welfare and, in certain circumstances, government regulation can stop them from doing so.

Fallacy #2:

Alternatively, we can stop hugging the Trade Practices Act and get out there and set up our own businesses in competition. I'm sure anti-competitive behaviour would then be seen in a different light.

This argument works if, as the Chicago school has a habit of doing, you assert that setting up competitive businesses in response to high profits is easy to do. But in the real world it isn't. There's any number of factors which can inhibit entry into particular markets, known as barriers to entry. I won't go into them in any detail, but Wikipedia has a reasonably good list (i've removed the ones which are created by government action):

Predatory pricing
Economy of scale
Customer loyalty
Advertising
Research and development
Sunk costs
Network effect
Distributor agreements
Supplier agreements

To that I'd add imperfect capital markets and imperfect knowledge of market conditions by potential entrants. These factors might not prevent entry in abstract theoretical models, but they do in the real world. Take the situation James' is actually discussing - Australian cardboard box manufacturing. Over the decade+ period in which Visy and Amcor colluded to set prices at above-market levels there was no substantial entry despite the persistence of this very profitable price level. Simply asserting that competitive entry will fix anti-competitive arrangements is a rhetorical flourish which conveniently ignores the real world barriers which prevent such entry.

And, to strike out, fallacy #3:

Businesses should not be burdened with the direct obligation of "enhancing the welfare of Australians". If they can get on with business, unfettered by competition regulation, they will fulfil this anyway.

Straight to the bottom of the class. The statement in bold rests on no less than four important assumptions and a few more esoteric ones. If any of these assumptions don't hold (and it's rare for any of them to hold absolutely, let alone all of them) then the statement fails. I've addressed only one of them here - the assumption that a free market will be competitive and thus deliver an efficient production outcome - the others I'll leave to another day. Needless to say, there's good reason why every advanced economy has responded to the inherent deficiencies in "law of the jungle" competition regulation by introducing competition laws.

Picture of the Week

2006-07-08T20:03:00.000+09:30

Modern sleep apnoea treatments look fun:

Quote of the Week

2006-07-08T20:00:00.000+09:30

From a front page newspaper article entitled Black Magic in Schools:

Many frightening and tragic things had happened to people who became involved with the occult and black magic. There was real power in worshipping evil but the power was dangerous and destructive. People who linked themselves with evil became evil-orientated "with disasterous results.

Ahh, they don't make newspapers like they used to. My wife found a 1974 edition of the local paper last week and it's a fascinating glimpse into an astonishingly different world.

By the way, my lack of posting can be explained by the extremely restrictive internet access at my vacation job and my inability to get any time on outside internet computers. Things will probably pick up once semester starts again.

Life Cycle Spending

2006-06-27T13:38:00.000+09:30

There's an economic theory floating around called the life cycle model which hypothesises that an individual's consumption pattern over their adult life should look approximately flat - that is, they spend an approximately equal amount of money in every year from the time they leave school to the time they, well, aren't spending money any more. The theory is based on a strong assumption that people are perfectly rational and have fairly static consumption preferences. The first of those assumptions is obviously somewhat suspect and I'm a big fan of a behavioural economics model which explains real world data somewhat better.

There's two main empirical holes in the life cycle model hypothesis - young people don't spend enough (because to do so would involve them essentially borrowing against their future income) and old people don't run down their savings quickly enough. Although I do like the behavioural explanations for these inconvenient facts, it is possible that people would like to consume as the life cycle hypothesis predicts but they are simply capital constrained from doing so - young people don't have the ability to borrow against future earnings and retiree's savings are locked up in capital assets that they can't or don't want to liquidate.

If this was the case, you would expect young people to start going into debt more and more if new avenues of borrowing were opened up to them. This might be happening:

Australians have an insatiable appetite for debt which makes them vulnerable to economic shock. In January, consumers held a record 12.6 million credit cards - almost a million more than a year earlier - with an average debt of $2656 a card.

Worryingly, the age of card holders is getting younger. Cultural monitor AustraliaSCAN reports that 46 per cent of 18- to 25-year-olds have a credit card.

The Financial Counsellors Association of NSW reported in 2003 that more than half of 18- to 24-year-olds interviewed had debts of more than $14,000, with a quarter having debts of more than $20,000.

Note the fairly large difference between the average debts of older and younger people, which is exactly what would be predicted by the life cycle hypothesis. As credit card providers and mobile phone companies have extended more avenues of credit to young people this group is taking up the opportunity. And contra the alarmist tone of the article, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Young people might be acting on the perfectly reasonable assumption that they'll pay their debts off when they have a proper job because they would like to spend money now while they have lots of spare time.

Book Review: Selling Sickness

2006-06-24T08:57:00.000+09:30

As with most left wing/anti-corporate polemics, Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All into Patients is a frustrating read. On the one hand it contains some important facts and information which provide a valuable insight into the marketing practices of large pharmaceutical companies. On the other hand it's written in such an obviously biased yet pseudo-objective style that it's painful to read (the poor and repetitive writing style, generally, doens't help) and Moynihan and Cassels fail to tackle some of the basic assumptions underlying their "this practice evil!" thesis. I'll give a brief overview of the book before looking at what I see as the flawed assumptions underlying much of the book.

Selling Sickness is divided into ten non-introductory chapters, each devoted to a different disease. The structure of each chapter is mostly uniform. It begins by outlining the way the boundaries of disease definitions have been expanded by the marketing practices of drug companies until absurd percentages of the population are deemed to be suffering from real or even newly invented diseases. He is quite specific in outlining these marketing practices and some of the insight here is quite valuable. Here's a list of the high-ball estimates drug companies have come up with for the diseases he chronicles:

Mental Illness - 30% of the population (figures are for the US population)

Major Depression - 10% of the population

ADD - 7% of children

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) - 20% of the population

High Cholesterol - (A risk factor increasingly treated as a disease in itself) 90% of the population over 55

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) - 13% of the population

Pre-Menstural Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) - 7% of women

Low Bone Density - (A risk factor for osteoperoris which is increasingly being treated as the disease of osteopenia) 50% of people over 50

Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD) - 43% of women

Many of these high figures are a direct result of expanding definitions. Thus in the early 90s the definition of High Cholesterol covered 13m Americans by 2004, after two revisions, it covered 40m people. The low bone density figures have been similarly inflated. The ridiculously high SAD figure is a result of the traditional requirement that the anxiety cause behavioural changes in people (ie they avoid situations which cause them anxiety) being dropped, so a high level of anxiety from certain social situations on its own is enough. And two of the conditions up there - PMDD and FSD - have been entirely invented by drug companies seeking to capture the associated drug market. The story of how FSD was (nearly) created is a particularly compelling one, covered in the final chapter of the book, and probably the part of the book most worth reading.

The book argues that the point of all these highball figures, which are trotted out in drug company press releases and regurgitated in media stories, is to create an atmosphere that diseases are massively unertreated. This in turn justifies direct consumer advertising and injunctions to "go see your doctor" from well paid celebrities pretending to be concerned ambassadors for diseases. The process of turning risk factors like high blood pressure/cholesterol and "low" bone density into pseudo-diseases that need to be treated on their own which is highlighted is also an interesting one and one which you'll notice in the media generally if you're looking out for it. Finally, the issue of people receiving drug company money doing the basic research and writing the definitions of diseases is an important one, especially as industry sponsorship (unsuprisingly) makes studies more favourable to the company drugs.

These interesting facts, figures and processes aside, large sections on the book rest on three unexplored and quite possibly flawed assumptions - if it's natural it shouldn't be medicated, the existence of multiple risk factors means we shouldn't worry about treating others with drugs and because absolute percentage gains from treating risk factors are small we shouldn't worry about them.

The general style of the book goes something like this:

"In the late 1950s drug company executives from DeviousEvilMassive Corp. recognised the potential for a massive new drug market. The "disease" they were setting out to cure was, at the time, regarded as a part of ordinary life but they hired CleverDeceptiveMarketing Co. to launch a cross-media advertising campaign to convince ordinary people that this condition was something which they needed to treat with a drug. They realised that only by medicalising ordinary life experiences could they ensure continuing and massive profits for their business - people who think they're healthy don't help drug companies make money. The campaign was wildly successful and before long nearly 40% of women in the US were daily using the drug they had come up with to treat this "disease." The marketing around this drug was so successful that people didn't even care that some of the daily pills were nothing more than placebos. The drug? The pill. The "disease"? Fertility."

Of course, I'm being facetious, but there's a serious point here. It's assumed that because something is a natural life experience we shouldn't do anything about it. This assumption heavily underlies the chapter on hormone replacement therapy for menopause and to a lesser degree the chapters on low bone density, PMDD and mental illnesses. Whether or not healthy people should take drugs to improve their lives is a fascinating question and one the writers completely fail to address. The discussion of menopause constantly refers to the fact that this natural part of life has been turned into the "disease" of low hormones and then treated with HRT. The discussion of the possible side effects of HRT (which treats the breast cancer risk as a settled conclusion when it's not, to my knowledge) makes it sound as if the reason many women take HRT is to reduce their risk of breast cancer which completely misses the point that they're mostly trying to avoid the natural consequences of menopause. There's a debate to be had as to whether or not we should use drugs to change what is normal in areas like mental abilities or sleep but the question isn't asked here - it's just assumed that natural = good.

On the issue of risk factors, the writers make a big deal of the fact that many of the treatments for high cholesterol only reduce the risk of a heart attack by 1%, which is a lower gain than you can get from treating other risk factors like smoking and obesity. Similarly they point out that bone breaks are caused more by falls than by low bone density. Somehow they use these facts to say we shouldn't try and treat low bone density or high cholestoral. But that doesn't make sense. Surely public health measures should be multi-pronged and the fact that drug companies are dealing with the risk factors which can be treated by drugs isn't exactly a shocking revelation. And there's only so far government's can go in "reducing falls" (which is what they advocate in the chapter on osteoperosis), so surely it isn't a bad thing to focus efforts on things they can help with like bone density. In any event, while telling an individual that they will reduce their risk by "1 in 100" of getting a heart attack will elicit a "so what?" response, from a population perspective a 1% reduction is surely not a bad thing to aim for. When you're talking about conditions like heart attacks which affect millions of people, a 1% reduction can be pretty significant.

And finally, I've returned the book to the library so I can't recount some of the worst examples of poor writing, but there's many. The writer's particularly like using the "critics say BAD THINGS about this" style to avoid saying those bad things themselves and it feels like a lot of the writing is repetitive padding. The book has some interesting insights if you can look past the dross and ignore arguments which are based on flawed logic. But if you have a low tolerance for that sort of thing then this book will seem fairly unconvincing, which means Moynihan and Cassels aren't doing much more than preaching to the converted.

Baillieu's Laziness

2006-06-19T13:20:00.000+09:30

Much ado is being made about a leaked Diary belong to a Brack's advisor which apparently shows the Murky Side of the government's politics. The main concern is about one line in it - "Index search on Mrs Baillieu, kids etc,". The government's reply is that MPs are required to provide "a concise description of any trust in which the member holds a beneficial interest or of which the member is trustee and a member of his family has a beneficial interest" and so this fact checking was to make sure Baillieu's disclosure was accurate. Sounds reasonable enough to me but it'd obvously depend on the depth of snooping involved.

Some of these news reports are also hinting that the diary disclosed another illegitimate/personal/dirty tactic used by the government. The diary described a key line of attack agains the new opposition leader as "even Libs call him 'Toff from Toorak'. Lazy. Inherited his money, his seat." That isn't an illegitimate attack - to my knowledge accurate. According to a Vic Lib I know, Baillieu's reputation in the Liberal party is as a lazy parliamentarian who has never had to work a day in his life and who cruises through his parliamentary responsibilities. That's an entirely fair impression to relay to the electorate, I'd say.

Picture of the Week

2006-06-17T15:45:00.000+09:30

Japan has apparently failed in its latest attempt to make this sight more common:

Hypocracy is something that, as a general rule, I try hard to avoid. Given that there is no longer a scientific basis for the continuation of the moratorium on commercial whaling and given that I am neither a vegeterian nor someone who thinks that hardcore vegetarian morals should translate into law even if I subscribed to them, I don't have much of an answer to this:

"There are enough humpbacks for both watching and sampling for scientific studies," he said. "In my country, whaling and whale watching co-exist, same in Norway, same in Iceland. From our point of view, it's not different from you going to a farming tour, see sheep and cattle and then you eat a barbecue after that. It's exactly the same for us."

Whale hunting is cruel but so is the mass slaughter of cows, the live skinning of chikens and the boiling of living seafood, not to mention the less than humane ways we raise a lot of our livestock. I think the way these cruelties should be addressed is not through legal bans (except with respect to practices absolutely unnecessary to getting the animal to the plate) but through informed consumer activism. I find the picture above uncomfortable so I wouldn't eat whale even if were sold in Australia. I find battery hens uncomfortable so I buy free range eggs (and really should find out where to buy free range chicken meat). Fast Food Nation made me uncomfortable with the way large fast food chains encourage - among other things - inhumane animal practices so I tend to stay away. But I can't see a convincing reason why the first of my moral predilictions should be enshrined in (international) law, so I've gotta say that I'm still with the Japanese on this one.

Quote of the Week

2006-06-16T13:35:00.000+09:30

Via The Green Knight, Jack Thompson is on the hyperbole drugs again. Talking about the moderately disturbing Left Behind games:

A Christian organization has now become one of the mental molesters of minors for money

Love the alliteration there. TGK also picks up on an exceedingly icky quote by Hitchens about "Lewinsky-style" which I won't reproduce and I suggest you don't read if you're faint of heart. It's a somewhat disturbing insight into his character.

Immoral Duties

2006-06-14T09:31:00.000+09:30

The central thesis of the movie The Corporation, a thesis shared by many anti-corporate activists, is that the corporation is inherently immoral/evil because it is legally required to ignore any interests other than their shareholder’s financial position. It is pointed out that there are various Common Law and statutory sources for this duty. One Australian example is found in section 181 of the Corporations Act:

(1) A director or other officer of a corporation must exercise their powers and discharge their duties:
(a) in good faith in the best interests of the corporation; and
(b) for a proper purpose.

The scenario which is usually painted when these legal obligations are pointed out is that corporations and their officers are legally prohibited from acting in an altruistic way and thus never do so. When I started corporations law this semester I was interested in learning more about this and finding all these examples of where shareholders had sued the directors of their companies for acting altruistically. Because you see corporations doing apparently altruistic things all the time. Think of the massive amounts raised by the business community after the Boxing Day Tsunami or any number of other instances of charitable of philanthropic donations. Surely if the law formally prevented the corporation from acting altruistically there should be dozens of cases of shareholders suing the company from breaching their duty to them.

These cases do not exist and I did press my (ex-labor lawyer and Labor party member) lecturer on this. There is precisely one case where a shareholder successfully sued a company for an altruistic act. In Parke v Daily News a small newspaper company was in the process of being wound up and the director decided to throw an employee party with the proceeds of the sale of a particular asset. One of the large shareholders got annoyed at this and successfully found the director in breach of his duty (so he had to cough the money up). This is a fairly unique situation because it was unarguable that the act was in the best (future) interests of the company because the company was about to end its existence.

The problem with the idea that director’s and other company agents are legally unable to act altruistically is that courts give a lot of deference to a company’s officers in how they exercise their powers. If there’s an even remotely arguable case that an act was in the company's best interests (eg. ‘I’m doing this to raise the company’s profile,’ ‘I’m paying my employees more so they work better,’ ‘I’m making a loss here to make money in the future’) then courts defer to that opinion, by and large. To defeat the presumption that a company’s officers aren’t acting ‘in good faith and in the best interests of the corporation’ you, in essence, need to show fraud. And it’s essentially impossible to show that an altruistic director is acting fraudulently because the personal interest simply isn’t there. This sort of statement, from Teck Corporation Ltd. v Miller is typical:

By what standards are the shareholders' interest to be measured?
...
If today the directors of a company were to consider the interests of its employees no one would argue that in doing so they were not acting bona fide in the interests of the company itself. Similarly, if the directors were to consider the consequences to the community of any policy that the company intended to pursue, and were deflected in their commitment to that policy as a result, it could not be said that they had not considered bona fide the interests of the shareholders.
...
[I]f they observe a decent respect for other interests lying beyond those of the company's shareholders in the strict sense, that will not, in my view, leave directors open to the charge that they have failed in their fiduciary duty to the company.

So at an abstract theoretic level, yes, the picture The Corporation and activists in general paint – where companies don’t act for the common good because they’re legally prohibited from doing so – is correct. But the real world doesn’t match up to the theory. Companies do good and companies do bad. The reasons for these actions lie more with the predilections of individual officers and certain corporate cultures than the legal definition of a company’s duties. The fact that directors and officers are legally obliged to only take into account shareholder interests has very little bearing on their real world actions. Now, there’s an entirely different argument with respect to limited liability, but that’s a story for another day.

Comment Moderation

2006-06-13T12:01:00.000+09:30

Oops, I accidentally turned comment moderation on which meant I had a few comments backlogged. For the record, I don't get enough comments to make any sort of control worthwhile and I try and make commenting as easy as possible, so comment away!

Iraq's Kidneys

2006-06-12T10:20:00.000+09:30

In my post on the black market for kidneys I noted that pre-invasion Iraq was something of a model demonstration of what a kidney free market could look like. A 2001 article in the New York Times magazine described the situation as one whith relatively good outcomes for both donors and donees. The trade was technically illegal, but flourished under Sadaam's averted gaze:

According to Friedlaender, though, one market trumps the rest. This market, he says, appears to offer kidney transplants performed by excellent surgeons, with careful screening of sellers, extraordinary postsurgical care and a success rate that evidently rivals even the finest U.S. hospitals. The program seems absent of false promises and persistent rip-offs. The price is a bargain. Some people have even idealized this program as a model of how a legalized system might one day function. It's located in Iraq.

I won't extract the rest here (it's at the end of the article if you're interested), but in short a transplant used cost the donee about $20,000, about $2,000 of which went to the donor. Health outcomes were excellent due to good post-operation care and the fact that the procedure could be carried out relatively openly.

Of course, the most recent Iraq invasion disrupted the operation a bit. But I've just run across an interesting Telegraph article which notes that the market seems to have sprung up again. The situation doesn't seem so idyllic any more, though:

Mr Hameed received a good price for his kidney. Would-be buyers with an eye for a bargain can now pick up a new kidney for as little as $700, given the desperation of fit and healthy Iraqis for money.

Young men like Mr Hameed can be seen loitering around many big hospitals in Baghdad these days, open to bids passed on via networks of shadowy middlemen who lurk in nearby cafés.

With unemployment in Iraq at about 60 per cent, the chance to earn money by touting body parts is a more calculated risk than, say, becoming a $150-a-month rookie policeman at the mercy of suicide attackers.
...
If car bombs, kidnappings and robberies are a deterrent, the price compares favourably to the $5,000 cost of a kidney on the black market in Turkey, or $3,000 in India. In Iraq, the operation itself typically costs $2,000. Even so, the risks are considerable. Baghdad's hospitals are filthy and under-resourced.

If a patient succumbs to post-operative infection or other complications, high-quality care cannot be guaranteed. The expertise needed to carry out what is a relatively simple surgical procedure is in abundance, however - the legacy of an era 15 years ago when Saddam Hussein's national health service met First World standards.
...
Col Abdul Jabbar Abo Natiha, the head of the unit, said: "We caught one donor from Basra who had originally come to Baghdad searching for a job. A group of guys befriended him, gave him lodgings and then insisted he paid a large amount of money in rent. They obliged him to sell his kidney to pay it. He only got $70 out of the deal."

In 2001, the going rate for a donor was $2,000. The fact that the price has tumbled, some doctors say, suggests that Iraqis are even more desperate for money now than they were under Saddam.

"It wasn't easy two or three years ago to find a donor," said a senior nurse at another Baghdad hospital. "Now patients' relatives need to make no big effort."

This points to an essential truth about any for-money kidney transplant operation - it's going to end up exploiting the most vulnerable. Especially if the market isn't regulated to ensure good post-op care for the donor, those who sell their kidneys might actually end up worse off after the transplant. The short term cash boost (which seems absurdly small in some cases here) is quickly dissipated but the long term health effects of being cut open, with associated risk of infection, and possibly having a rib broken to gain access to the kidney can harm the donor's income earning capacity for years. Like I said previously, I'm unsold on the idea of a free market for kidneys for practical reasons like this and broader ethical concerns. Certainly I think other options - like an opt-out cadaver donation system - should be explored first. The current situation in Iraq seems to serve as a cautionary tale of where kidney selling can end up when there is an abundance of desperately poor people bidding the sale price down in a market of medically limited demand.

Law v Justice

2006-06-11T10:07:00.000+09:30

The issue of law versus justice is one that inevitably confronts those of us who go through law school. It struck me pretty hard the other day when I was reading a case for my Equity exam, Re Diplock's Estate (sorry Equity students who are trying desperately hard to forget this stuff!). This was a 1948 Enlish case which was concerned with ~£200,000 which had been paid to various charities under a will in 1939. The charities were a diverse group. One was a children's hospital which had used its distribution to build a new 'Diplock' ward, a school used the £6,000 it received to pay off an outstanding loan, the National Institute of the deaf used £1,500 to cover operating expenses and so on. The trustees of the estate had spread the money far and wide - £200,000 went a long way in the '30s.

The reason this situation turned into a case that Equity students read today is that the clause in the will under which this money had been distributed was invalid. As a general rule you can't leave money under a will for vague purposes such as 'the advancement of social good' or 'the promotion of Conservative politics.' There are a few reasons for these sorts of rule, the chief one being that such uncertain instructions leave too much room for the money to be fraudulently misapplied. The only valid purposes you can apply money for in this way are specific charitable purposes.

Poor (and/or mis-advised) Mr. Diplock left this money 'for such charitable institution or institutions or other charitable or benevolent object or objects in England.' Unfortunately the word 'benevolent' is uncertain according to the common law. If he had simply left the words 'or benevolent' out then this clause would have been fine. But according to English common law you can't just sever this phrase, you have to read the clause as a whole and benevolent is uncertain and therefore the distribution was invalid.

Now, I was reading this case to learn lots of important equitable principles. Things about equitable personal claims wrt volunteers, tracing, the rule in Clayton's case, change of position defence, whether you have to exhaust remedies against the executor before going against the volunteer, mixed accounts, the pari passu rule and the treatment of loan payments. All wonderful things that I had to learn for my exam. But what really struck me was how divorced from reality the judgement was. What the judges were about to do was to tell all these charities that they had to give all their money back to the greedy next of kin who had successfully challenged the validity of Diplock's will. They were going to do so by either forcing the charities to sell the property they had bought with the will money or simply cough it up if the money had changed in nature too much or been dissipated. It was a pretty immoral result, but the judges were absolutely amoral in their writing. The case is some 40,000 words long and not once do they talk about whether or not this is a good thing. They were completely legalistic in their approach, doing careful detective work to divine the intent of judges writing on similar situations in the 1600s.

This was black letter law at its best. The judges carefully, meticulously traced the path of precedent and found a result which was completely orthodox with respect to the established legal rules. This is Conservative judging with a capital C. Judges don't make the law, they apply it. If the law is unjust it's not for judges to do anything about it, it's for parliament. These are mantras of Conservatives in their complaints against 'judge made law' and they are directed to one end – reducing judicial discretion to produce a just result where the application of the existing law produces an unjust result.

But stability in the law shouldn't be seen as a good in itself. Stability can certainly be valuable in many areas of the law, but it's difficult to see how the social good was promoted by sticking to strictly orthodox principles in a case like this one. For one, the line of authority the judges discovered is itself legally anomalous (for law students, it's an unprincipled exception to the first limb of Barnes v Addy). But more importantly, judges should surely try to uphold the will's intent in these circumstances. Promoting certainty in wills is a good thing, but the phrase 'or benevolent' is only fractionally uncertain and having silly little pitfalls like this needlessly frustrate the will of the deceased person. Not to mention the detrimental effect this decision had on the charities who had received this money and acted in reliance on it doesn't promote the social good in any way.

Anyway, this is just one example of dozens I could give where the correct legal result is unjust and unnecessarily so. Sometimes judges should value stability in the law over getting the correct result in a hard case. But like all things, black letter law can be taken too far and stability shouldn't be seen as an absolute principle. Occasionally a little flexibility and 'legislating from the bench' can be a good thing.

Picture of the Week

2006-06-11T09:55:00.000+09:30

This video supporting Ned Lamont's primary challenge against the incumbent Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman has to be seen to be believed. It's a perfect example of how badly enthusiastic grass-roots activism meshes with traditional politics. The video begins with standard Democrat talking head talking standard boring stuff:

Then Kos shows up in the window and it gets a bit weird:

But then insano screaming girl makes an appearance and you’ll never be the same again.

By the end it’s an unmatchable mess of Democratic diversity and horribly misplaced enthusiasm. You are left wondering how anyone thought airing that video in public was a good idea.

Quote of the Week

2006-06-04T17:57:00.000+09:30

Kevin Rudd, in response to the Queensland coalition merger:

Mark Vaile as leader of the Nationals is starting to look as useful as a jam sandwich to a drowning rabbit. It’s just getting really silly.

Weirdest. Metaphor. Ever.

SWOT Vac is FUN!

2006-06-02T08:55:00.000+09:30

...Especially when you get the dates of your exams mixed up :). Normal posting will resume sometime in the next couple of weeks, I haven't been on the internet much in the last week and it might be the same next week.

Lies, Damn Lies and Gun Statistics

2006-05-27T10:14:00.000+09:30

I don't know what it is with pro-gun lobbys but they have an almost pathological proclivity towards lying through statistics. Take their claim that hunting is safer than table-tennis:

One of hunting's dirty little secrets has been revealed: The "safety statistics" kept and promoted by various government agencies--which purport to show just how safe hunting really is--are a total joke.

Consider, for instance, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. On the "Safety First" page of its online hunter-education course, the department declares that "hunting is one of the safest outdoor activities you can enjoy" and backs up its claim by citing National Safety Council statistics that purport to show that hunting is not only safer than fishing and swimming; it's safer than football, basketball, and baseball! Or take this 2004 press release from Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources, which proclaims, "Based on the number of people seeking emergency-room treatment for sports injuries, The National Safety Council reports that hunting has fewer injuries per 100,000 people participating than football, baseball, cycling, volleyball, swimming, golf, tennis, fishing, bowling, badminton, billiards and ping-pong."

Now, you know that this claim is absurd and the way statistics are abused to make the statements factually correct are laughable. All injuries are treated equally seriously ("Getting hit by 200 pellets of birdshot is treated just like spraining a pinkie in ping-pong") and fatalities aren't counted by the parks department at all. Also, the time spent in each activity, which is a good measure of its risk, isn't taken into account. While people may spend dozens of hours a week training and playing sports like football, many hunters who make up the "per 100,000" part of the raw statistics only participate for a few hours a year.

When I posted on Australian gun statistics a couple of weeks ago I linked the dissection of one gun group's distortion of statistics related to Australia's gun buy back. There's so many fallacies in the piece that I won't list them all, but it uses irrelevant stastics (eg. absolute not real growth figures) statistically irrelevant increases, flat out wrong figures and weasel words like "dramatic" where the figures don't actually look all that bad.

An anonymous commentator, trying to convince me that claims of a reduction in gun violence in Australia following the gun buy-back were incorrect, inadvertently displayed another example of the gun lobby distorting Australian gun statistics. The piece is very high minded, trying to portray itself as a tool to educate the public on statistics so that they don't get deceived by statistical trickery:

The mere mention of statistics can be enough to provoke slumber, but statistics are used every day to make points, support arguments or disprove theories.

The problem is that statistics can be misused misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Why yes, yes they can. For their own inscruitable reasons, the "International Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting" which put out the paper decide to make a point about they way rate of change statistics could be misused by inappropriately taking into account the statistical blip caused by the port arthur massacre. They note that if you look at the rate of change in the decline in gun deaths before and after 1996 there is no real difference, as long as you don't include 1996 in the second period:

I'm not sure why they picked the rate of change statistic. If I were making a hypothesis about a massive gun buy back I would suppose that it would have the effect of reducing the absolute number of gun deaths and, perhaps, help maintain a long term decline in overall gun violence. There's no particular reason to think that it would accelerate that long term decline. Unfortunately, the Age piece I linked to did use the language of an increase in the rate of decline in gun deaths:

So, 10 years on, can we see a difference? Resoundingly, yes. In the decade up to and including Port Arthur, Australia experienced 11 mass shootings. In these 11 events alone, 100 people were shot dead and another 52 wounded. In the 10 years since 1996 and the new gun laws, not one mass shooting has occurred in Australia. For this reason alone, Australia is a safer place. (In 2002, a gunman killed two and wounded four at Monash University. Five victims are internationally recognised as a mass shooting.)
...
Even before Port Arthur, gun-related deaths, suicides, homicides and unintentional shootings were slowly dropping. But after the tragedy, the rate of decline accelerated markedly. From 1979 to 1996, 11,110 Australians died by gunshot - an annual average of 617. In the seven years after new gun laws were announced (1997 to 2003), the yearly average almost halved, to 331.

But the figures that are used there are averages of absolute numbers, not rate of change statistics. Looking at the raw numbers, not just the averages, the number of gun deaths did have an unusually large fall after the introduction of the gun laws, and this isn't just a decline caused by comparing 1996-1997:

(source)

In case you were wondering, the fall correlated with the gun buy-back is statistically siginificant (1996 was excluded from that analysis so the massacre didn't distort the statistics). Incidentally, that latter paper also highlighted an important point. You can't look at the 1997 gun-buy back in isolation. Australia and Victoria in particular have had a history of tightening gun ownership laws, particuarly in the late 1980s after the Hoddle street and other massacres. Each of these phases of tightening legislation is associated with a statistically significant decline in the number of gun-related deaths and the cumulative effect of these gradually increasing restrictions has probably contributed to the long run fall in firearms related deaths.

Despite the many, many attempted distortions of pro-gun lobby groups (their fingerprints are all over the wikipedia article on gun politics in Australia), the basic point I was making in my previous post still stands. Australia is safer because of Howard's gun buy-back. I can only think that the pathological tendancy of gun groups to distort statistics for their own ends stems from a refusal to admit that the real world cost of widespread gun ownership in society is measured in blood. I can understand why they're uncomfortable with that, but it doesn't mean we should listen to them.

Conservative Crackup

2006-05-25T16:01:00.000+09:30

I wrote a little while ago about how the issue of immigration in the US seems likely to split one of the political parties in the lead up to the November election. But it seems I picked the wrong party - it's the Republicans not the Democrats who are melting down over the issue. I kind of assumed that most Republican's knew about their president's very pro-immigration positions by now, with them having been public for half a decade or so, but it seems that his base has either ignored or been ignorant of it until now. But now the sleeping base has woken up.

The immigration issue was brought to the forefront by debate in the Senate about what to do with a punitive anti-immigration bill passed by the house late last year. To generalise, the conservative, southern, activist republican base loved that bill, but began to get annoyed when it became apparent that it wasn't going to come close to passing the Republican dominated Senate. To try and quell disqueit in the ranks - I've read in a couple of places that Bush's support among republicans fell about 20% in a month, but I don't have the time to dig up the links now, but it's reflected in his first 29% approval rating - Bush did a special prime time television presentation. This did nothing to stop conservative disquiet, perhaps because it was full of the sort of nuance he's spent most of his presidancy denouncing. The fire breathing republican base doesn't want nuance, it wants action. Stern, stern action:

"Not only will [mass deportation] work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society,"

That sort of hateful rhetoric is one step beyond most of what's out there (and it seems to have embarrassed the original writer enough that he's removed that paragraph), but exceptionally strong, no-negotiation anti-immigration sentiment is widespread among conservative activists (just browse a couple of days of Michelle Malkin posts if you want examples). The level of sentiment out there is such that infamous conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh stated "I can't think of any single issue, in the 18 years I have been on the air, which has Republicans more up in arms than this one"

The split in the Republican party I alluded to before isn't so much in the base as it is between fiery, grassroots activists and more moderate republicans who are both inclined to defer to President Bush and not so emotionally fired up about the immigration issue. This sort of split was on very public display over at high profile conservative blog PoliPundit. This blog has operated as a group blog for a year or so, with the more militant founder of the site allowing his moderate fellow bloggers a fair bit of freedom, making for an interesting mix of opinions.

But the original PoliPundit has been going off the deep end quite fervently over the past month. He's started calling Bush "El Presidente Jorge Arbusto" (Spanish for president Bush), a liar and, well, a traitor:

He’s been bought and paid for by by his big money paymasters, who want cheap labor. El Presidente is an agent of Mexico, not a representative of the American people. His Monday night speech will be a cheap attempt to scam us yahoos into thinking he actually cares about America’s borders. He does not.

The comments in reply to the post where he banned all other people from posting really reveal the depth of the split in the party.

Anyway, I find watching this car-crash pretty interesting. I'm not sure what it means for the US political landscape, come the mid-terms in November though. I think it's pretty clear that Bush is going to be pretty toxic to Republican candidates, with respect to the republican base at least. And given his divisive presidence so far, Bush doesn't have much more than his base to rely on. Democrats so far, to my knowledge, are keeping pretty quiet on what exactly they'd do about mass illegal immigration in the US. But that might not matter at the polls, if enough Republicans are angry enough at their party that they stay home. I'm glad I can sit in Australia and feel no more than an academic interest in the issue, though, cause it's a messy one and one the polarised US political system is extremely ill-prepared to deal with.

Picture of the Week

2006-05-23T09:27:00.000+09:30

Those materiel shortages are really biting in Iraq:

Via Donklephant.

Quote of the Week

2006-05-23T08:48:00.000+09:30

One of Sullivan's strengths is his ability to articulate basic tenets of liberal political philosphy in a much more coherent way than hacks like me can. He did it with torture late last year and he's doing it with the separation of church and state at the moment with his ongoing series of posts on "Christianism". One interesting argument he addresses:

Here's one point worth dealing with. It's the notion that everyone has a religion, whether they call it that or not - including "secular humanism" - and that trying to curtail Christianity or Islam or any other faith from direct application to political life and civil law creates a double-standard. People can bring their secular worldviews into politics, but Christians cannot bring their religious doctrines. No fair, many argue. In fact, these rules are actively discriminatory against Christian fundamentalists. Hence the so-called "war on Christianity."

After drawing a logical line between faith and secular reasoning, he notes the practical reason why democratic politics must have a secular basis.:

By definition, therefore, the conflation of our politics with the will of God makes political discourse largely impossible, because we don't all believe in the same God or even in God at all. And so the introduction of religious authority into politics makes all our political dealings inseparable from profound differences over the deepest things - the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of God, and so on.

It's a good point. Politics can't work when you're not arguing about issues at hand but about the spiritual meaning of life. Faith by its nature isn't subject amenable to discussion and compromise and these things are necessary for a democratic political system to have a chance of functioning. If decisions in a democracy are able to be made by a faith-based majority such decisions will lack legitimacy in the eyes of a minority who is unconvinced by appeals to higher powers. Not to suggest that religion and faith can't or shouldn't influence public discussion, but it can't be used as a final answer for political questions.

Devilish Detail

2006-05-20T09:23:00.000+09:30

The federal government's been getting a bit of press about the "sweeping" changes it's going to make to the Copyright act in response to a review into the act which was comissioned last year. But I think it'd be a good idea to reserve judgement on the magnitude of the changes until the text of the Act is released because if the FAQ in the Attorney General's meida release on the changes is anything to go by, nothing much will change in practice. Australian copyright laws at the moment prohibit virtually all forms of time and format shifting. Thus recording TV or radio programs to watch or listen to at a later time is illegal. Here's the headline change on this aspect of the law:

Does this mean I can record my favourite television or radio program to enjoy later?

Yes. For the first time you will be able to record most television or radio program (sic) at home to enjoy at a later time.

And the fine print?

How long can I keep the recording?

The recording must be deleted after one use.

So we're removing one ridiculous and unenforcable restriction on time shifting and replacing it with another ridiculous and unenforcable restriction. The status quo as far as people taping shows won't change, but the law's moral authority will continue to be undermined by rampant and unprosecutable breaches.

On format shifting the changes might have even less impact on the legality of, say, ripping your CD to an iPod. The headline change sounds good:

Will I be able to copy my music collection?

Yes. You can format-shift your music collection from CDs, audio tapes and vinyl records to devices such as an MP3 player.

But the fine print...

Can I copy music downloaded to a CD or MP3 player?

Yes, if you have purchased a legitimate copy and it is permitted by the purchase agreement.

The scope of this "purchase agreement" exception to will be the key to whether or not these new laws have any practical effect on the legality of format shifting. Purchase agreements are only mentioned in the context of downloaded audio, so the scope might be narrow. But if companies can put a "you can't format shift" clause into the "shrink-wrap" licenses of all purchased media then the practice will remain as illegal as it is now, because all content providers will put those clauses in as a matter of course. I can't see why the exception would apply to downloaded audio and not hard copy CDs, but the full text of the changes hasn't been relased so it's possible that it's only relevant to those situations.

Finally, nothing has been done, yet, about the only thing currently stopping people from format shifting in practice, copy protection. A little while ago EMI started encoding the CDs it sells in Australia with a really nasty form of copy protection which prevents computers from reading the discs as audio disks (in fact, they had to take the "CD-ROM" symbol off the disks, because it's a completely different encoding format). Thus I had to download Radiohead's Hail to the Thief and The Living End's Modern Artillery to listen to them on my iPod even though I legally purchased them, which was just silly. This practice isn't universal yet, but if it becomes more wide spread then any move to allow format shifting under copyright laws will have little practical effect. The official word is that "the Government is still considering this issue of copy protection" which is better than not considering it at all. I hope their considerations will come up with a solution which aligns copyright laws with real world behaviour better than it seems the just announced format and time shifting changes will.

Privatisation and Skills Shortages

2006-05-17T09:11:00.000+09:30

There's much talk at the moment about Australia's skills shortages. One survey found that 52% of Australian firms have trouble finding skilled employees and the ABS has released figures showing a likely link between skills shortages and wage increases. In economics text books skills shortages shouldn't happen. Current and potential workers should be attracted to work in areas suffering from skills shortages due to increasing wages in those areas. Those wages should reflect any costs of training and so workers should be willing to incur those expenses as they will recover them through higher wages. Of course the real world doesn't work like that.

Individuals, especially in the relatively lower paid sectors which are currently experiencing skills shortages, are evidently reluctant to bear the costs of training themselves. Individual workers risk averse and the gains from studying, without a specific employer arrangement, are very uncertain. Also, they might not have enough liquid capital to cover living expenses while studying. Information deficiencies also prevent the labor market from fully adapting to changing skills needs. All this, and probably other factors, mean we do get skills shortages.

I think there's one aspect of the current crisis (if it should be called that) which has been overlooked. Traditionally large government employers have provided extensive graduate or entry-level programs which give workers the pratical training needed to work in certain industries. I know that the State Electricity Comission, for example, used to be a key provider of engineering, metalworking and other trades training. These sorts of programs are often inefficient from the employer's point of view as they often don't reap the gains from the training thanks to a mobile labor force. Take a recent example:

A BALLARAT company has sacked 35 Australian labourers but kept on up to 25 Chinese welders it imported last year, sparking union anger over failing to train locals in vital trades.

MaxiTRANS, which builds semitrailers, made headlines last year when it imported foreign welders and boilermakers while freezing its apprenticeship program temporarily.
...
Ballarat Trades Hall secretary Graeme Shearer said the company should be training its Australian workers rather than importing foreigners.

He said some of the workers sacked in recent weeks had been at the firm for 20 months and should have been given a chance to learn a trade.

"How can it be a good thing to bring guest labourers into Australia, then sack existing workers and put them on welfare?" he asked.

Australian Manufacturing Workers Union state organiser Victor Jose said the workers were caught in a "vicious circle".

"MaxiTRANS are doing nothing to provide long-term solutions to this skills shortage, they are bringing on casuals and then moving them on, but not providing any benefit to the local workforce while the Chinese staff have stayed, " he said.

From MaxiTRANS and other companies in this position, not providing costly training services to its employers make perfect sense. It's a case of externalities in that the training has more value to society as a whole than the employer who is often in the position of providing it. Protected state monopolies once provided this training and I think the wave of privatisation which swept the country over the past two decades has probably contributed to the current skills shortage.

This isn't to say that we should try and undo the privatisation reforms. It's just to say we should recognise that the state once provided valuable training services through those public entities and that it should realise it needs to continue offering that training through more formal structures, or by subsidising on the job training.

Games: The New Tobacco?!

2006-05-15T14:12:00.000+09:30

There was an article in the Saturday Age this week which attempted to draw a really, really long bow by connecting the Video Games industry with the tobacco industry:

Nintendo and Sony, the two biggest companies, earned about $US11 billion ($A14.1 billion) last year, and along with more than a dozen other global players employ thousands of staff and spend billions, mainly on marketing.

Glamour, excitement and addiction — the latter a word often used by games developers — make a potent combination. Stir in money, rapid change and the rush to lock up new markets, and it becomes clearer what is at stake. Keeping the lid on negative news is now an industry obsession. Bartholow is not the only one to see parallels with the way that Big Tobacco continued the illusion that there was no proof of a connection between smoking and cancer. It was an "open question", their spokesmen said.

"For years I've been pointing out in various talks and some papers that the video game industry response to research on harmful effects looks very similar to what the tobacco lobby did for many years," says Professor Craig Anderson, a psychologist from Iowa State University, whose persistence as an expert critic of games violence and video games companies has made him an "enemy".

The analogy between games and tobacco apparently is "these companies are big and have money and people criticise them and they try and rebut the criticism therefore they are evil." The article does highlight one interesting case where a Japanese scientist was apparently co-opted by Nintendo, but it's unconvincing overall because it starts with a premise it assumes to be true - video games make people violent and destroys their brains therefore any attempt by the video game industry to argue against this is a cover up - without really examining this complex issue.

The problem with the video game violence debate is that the two sides are absolutely intractactable in their positions because they're not really arguing about whether or not video games increase violence in players. On the one side is usually family values type groups, who are more concerned about the fact that video games aren't traditional childhood play and that all the ones which break through to popular consciousness (Mortal Kombat, Doom, Grand Theft Auto) are really violent and/or immoral. These people are concerned about video game usage per se, any actual link to an increase in societal violence is merely a bonus which makes their arguments more politically acceptable. On the other side are video game players who refuse to acknowledge that their games could have any effect on their behaviour ("I've played shooters for 10 years and I haven't shot anyone yet" etc.) and who are, to make a useful generalisation, young people who see the issue as another case of old fogies misunderstanding a new entertainment form.

It also doesn't help that some prominent video game opponents are idiots. Take Jack Thompson, who The Age piece noted is a lawyer involved in suing various game developers:

Meanwhile a fifth court case, the result of a triple murder in an Alabama police station, is being prepared. In it Sony, Wal-Mart and two games design companies are being sued for $US600 million by the families of three murdered men. The families argue that 18-year-old Devin Moore was acting on what he had learned from Grand Theft Auto, a violent video game that was the 10th highest-selling in Australia last year.

"The video game industry gave him a cranial menu that popped up in the blink of an eye in that police station," the victims' lawyer, Jack Thompson, told CBS News. "And that menu offered him the split-second decision to kill the officers, shoot them in the head, flee in a police car, just as the game itself trained them to do."

So far attempts by opponents to have the case thrown out and Thompson disbarred have been unsuccessful.

The last bit is made to sound like a bad thing, as if the video game industry was unable to defend the issue so it's trying to play the man. But the man in this case is a fool:

Since I started to work on my Really Big Jack Thompson story, he has: been denounced by the National Institute on Media and the Family; denounced them back; announced a contest to build a satirical game based on a gamer who goes on a rampage and kills a lot of people; had a couple of developers make the game; reneged on his offer to pay $10,000 to a charity if the game was built, which led the fine fellows at Penny Arcade to respond by writing a $10,000 check to charity to cover Jack's original promise and then sell "I Hate Jack Thompson" t-shirts, which led Jack to send a letter to the Seattle Police Department suggesting the PA guys were harassing him. Most recently, activist gamers responded to Jack's threats against PA by urging the Florida bar to consider this as misconduct.

And I haven't been working on the story that long.

That piece also notes that he has called Japanese distribution of video games in America "Pearl Harbor 2", falsely claimed that character models in the Sims had fully-rendered genitals, suggested that Janet Reno went easy on the video game industry because she was a lesbian and compared the head of the Electronic Software Association to Goebbels and/or Hitler. Trying to get his (often spurious) cases thrown out of court isn't exactly a witch hunt by the game industry.

Anyway, the actual issue of whether or not video games (and media more generally) incites violence is a more nuanced one than either side will concede. One study apprently showing such a link got some press at the end of last year:

A brain mechanism that may link violent computer games with aggression has been discovered by researchers in the US. The work goes some way towards demonstrating a causal link between the two - rather than a simple association.
...
The team recruited 39 experienced gamers, and used questionnaires to assess the amount of violent games they played. They then showed them real-life images, mostly of neutral scenes, but interspersed with violent or negative (but non-violent) scenes, while recording EEGs.

In subjects with the most experience of violent games, the P300 response to the violent images was smaller and delayed. “People who play a lot of violent video games didn’t see them as much different from neutral,” says Bartholow. They become desensitised. However, their responses are still normal for the non-violent negative scenes.
...
But the study has failed to convince some critics. “We habituate to any kind of stimulus,” says Jonathan Freedman, a psychologist from the University of Toronto, Canada, who has prepared several government-level reports on media and games violence. “All we are really getting is desensitisation to images. There’s no way to show that this relates to real-life aggression.”

In 2000, A Rolling Stone writer, Richard Rhodes, did a fairly comprehensive literature review and concluded very strongly that there was little evidence supporting a violent media/violent behaviour link and that many of the studies in the area used fatally flawed methodologies. In fact he concluded that violent media was positively good for many:

But there is no good evidence that taking pleasure from seeing mock violence leads to violent behavior, and there is some evidence, as Jib Fowles found, that it leads away. Bottom line: To become violent, people have to have experience with real violence. Period. No amount of imitation violence can provide that experience. Period. At the same time, mock violence can and does satisfy the considerable need to experience strong emotion that people, including children, build up from hour to hour and day to day while functioning in the complex and frustrating interdependencies of modern civilization. So can comedy; so can serious drama; but young males especially (and even not-so-young males) evidently take special satisfaction in watching mock violence, whether dramatic or athletic. "Whatever the relation of this need may be to other, more elementary needs such as hunger, thirst, and sex," concludes Norbert Elias, "one may well find that the neglect of paying attention to this need is one of the main gaps in present approaches to problems of mental health."

But there is also some scientific evidence, including more recent studies like the one I linked above, to support this conclusion:

The results, overall, have been fairly consistent across types of studies (experimental, cross-sectional (often called “correlational”), and longitudinal (another type of “correlational” study). There is a significant relation between exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior. Increased exposure leads to increased aggressive behavior. A single exposure can increase aggression in the immediate situation. Repeated exposure leads to general increases in aggressiveness over time. This relation is causal.
...
In general, people who already are highly aggressive sometimes appear to be more affected by media violence in the immediate situation than those who are not highly aggressive. But again, this doesn’t always occur. Those from poorer backgrounds may be more at risk, but that may be because they tend to be exposed to higher levels of media violence, or because of other aggression-enhancing factors present in their environments. There is also some evidence that younger people (children, young adolescents) are more negatively affected by exposure to media violence than adults. However, a recent longitudinal study in Science magazine (March 29, 2002) revealed that even young adults are negatively affected.

The abstract of that 2002 Science study notes:

Television viewing and aggressive behavior were assessed over a 17-year interval in a community sample of 707 individuals. There was a significant association between the amount of time spent watching television during adolescence and early adulthood and the likelihood of subsequent aggressive acts against others. This association remained significant after previous aggressive behavior, childhood neglect, family income, neighborhood violence, parental education, and psychiatric disorders were controlled statistically.

There is also a commentary on that study in the same issue of Science which notes:

Evidence is steadily accumulating that prolonged exposure to violent TV programming during childhood is associated with subsequent aggression. In their Perspective, Anderson and Bushman discuss new work (Johnson et al.) that clearly demonstrates this association in adolescents and young adults, thus broadening the range of individuals affected by media violence.

That commentary includes a handy graph which brings together conclusions of all the studies in the area:

I point out these studies because I think that the bold claims made by that Rolling Stone article and gamers more generally are scientifically false. There does seem to be some correlation and causative links between consumption of violent media and an increase in violent tendencies. But trying to paint the games industry as the new tobacco is way over the top. For one, the studies don't suggest a link between violent games and behaviour in older adolescents and adults. For another, the science isn't completely clear, especially with respect to the so-called "game brain" effect. And finally the analogy fails because it's much, much harder to draw a causative link between game use and a particular violent act because the causes of violence are much more diverse and difficult to pin down than, say, the causes of lung or throat cancer in a long term smoker. That's why attempts to sue game companies for events like Columbine get thrown out of courts in short order and why concern over game violence should be targeted towards vulnerable groups ('won't someone think of the children?'). So if an industry is defending itself from dubious lawsuits brought by dubious lawyers claiming it is responsible for various high profile massacres, don't go dropping the "Tobaccoevilcoverrup!!" line. Please.

Picture of the Week

2006-05-15T09:35:00.000+09:30

A somewhat unusual Car showroom in Germany:

(I stole the image from Snopes)

Quote of the Week

2006-05-13T13:41:00.000+09:30

Via The Green Knight, some leaked documents outline the Bush administration's instructions to the US Department of Agriculture on how to sell the Iraq war:

Several topics I'd like to talk about today - Farm Bill, trade with Japan, WTO, avian flu, animal ID - but before I do, let me touch on a subject people always ask about.... progress in Iraq.

Not exactly the first thing which comes to mind when I think of the USDA, but hey. At least they have a factual, spin-free answer on hand which is relevant to the agricultural sector:

We are helping the Iraqi people build a lasting democracy that is peaceful and prosperous - one that will never again be a safe haven for terrorists, and will serve as a model for freedom in the broader Middle East.

A Year!

2006-05-11T12:12:00.000+09:30

Just realised I've been doing this blog for a year so it seems a good opportunity to link my favourite posts to date. Blogging is an excercise in narcissim anyway, so doing this hardly seems to make the situation worse. The posts I'm happiest with often seem to be the ones which get the least comments, which is a shame. Anyway, in no particular order here's 10 of my previous posts that I'm fairly happy with:

The Pointy End of Freedom of Speech
I took the time to read the Victorian Catch the Fire/Muslim defamation case and found that what was presented that seminar was truly extreme.

The Right to Silence, parts 1, 2 and 3.
I think these do a reasonable job of explaining one of the most confusing yet fundamental aspect of criminal justice.

China and the Theory of Second Best
A little exploration of how and why China's economy has been able to grow despite not jumping on the "property rights first" development bandwagon.

IR Reform Makes Utopia
A look at an often overlooked conclusion of welfare economics - efficiency and equity aren't incompatible.

Iraq: Past, Present and Future, parts 1, 2 and 3
My attempts to understand and analyse the Iraq war.

Why Must They All Be the Same?
I got a bit angry at some of the false dichotomies presented in the "what motivates terrorists" debate.

Excuse Me, Sir, Your Frame is Bogus
VSU has nothing to do with the free market.

Principled Tax Reform
The case for eliminating income tax deductions

The Black Market for Kidneys, parts 1 and 2
I find the question of whether or not there should be a legal market for kidneys a fascinating moral dilemma.

Book Review: Promises to Keep
A look at one proposal in the the digital copyright debate.

And while I'm at it, a thanks to everyone who reads this blog and special thanks to those who take the time to comment (the two Johns, Joel and Charles especially). I hope you've enjoyed the blog so far and I should be continuing my sporadic posting until at least the end of the year.

Budget... Yawn

2006-05-11T10:36:00.000+09:30

The finances of the Australian government are in a once in a generation position. Coffers are swelling thanks to a perfect storm of high mineral prices, favourable international economic conditions, low inflation and international money lenders willing to finance our massive debt without extracting too many pounds of flesh. Opportunities like this don't come along very often. This sort of temporary surplus gives a government the option of implementing a reform package which will benefit the overall economy but create short term losers without the associated political pain. Transitional spending measures can be used to quieten noisy groups who will be hurt by the changes, bringing about an outcome which not only benefits everyone in the long run but also doesn't cause excessive losses to anyone in the short run.

Opportunities like this abound. The tax system could receive the sort of generational overhaul it desperately needs. Our water management systems could be redesigned to become more sustainable, especially in the face of changing climate. We could actually do something to reduce our contribution to that changing climate and move towards energy independence. Our anachronistic and competition-damaging, corruption-enhancing single desk agricultural policies could be phased out. The full corporatisation/privatisation of Telstra could be achieved by removing it of its service obligations and putting the cost of meeting those obligations on the public purse where they belong. The States could be weaned off their addiction to inefficient and costly private partnerships, an addiction catalysed by an extreme aversion to government debt and a severely limited taxation base at the State level.

Instead of doing any of these things, which would result in short term expenditure to ameliorate the political pain necessary to create long term benefits, the government has just thrown it's hands up in the air and refused to tackle any of these problems. Instead it's created a potentially enormous hole in future budgets by eliminating tax on most superannuation withdrawals, without so much as an investigation as to whether or not the move will actually increase savings (there is an income effect created by reducing this tax, so people might reduce their gross savings because they know their net receipts will not be changed). The effect of this move on the budget over the short term is moderate ($6.4bn/year now rising to $9-10bn in 3-4 years), but as more baby boomers and people who have made compulsory superannuation payments for a substantial portion of their working lives retire the effect will be enormous. Yes, there is a case for concessional tax treatment of superannuation, but an elimination of this proportion, without any pressing policy reason for doing so and right before it's going to start costing a whole lot more is unnecessarily reckless and simply lazy policy making.

The only other big ticket item of the budget is the income tax cuts. Income tax cuts are a good way of giving people's money back to them when you don't have any better way of using that money. But I'm suggesting that the magnitude of the surplus gave make substantial policy changes and give money back to affected portions of the public who are affected by those changes. Simply shifting the tax brackets a bit is, once again, lazy policy making. The Howard government is a government in cruise control. It's bereft of ideas and it has no idea how to use the once in a lifetime surplus it has found itself with thanks to forces outside its control. So it's used the money on tax measures which will reduce the ability of future governments to raise revenue right when the resource-driven tax boom begins to fade out and government liabilities increase because of an aging population. What a waste.

Signing the Constitution Away

2006-05-08T09:33:00.000+09:30

When I did the American Revolution in a year 12 history class, one unit of the subject was a little "flash forward" to the post-revolutionary period to see how some of the revolutionary ideas had influenced actual practices in the colonies. One of these events that we looked at was Marbury v Madison, the early Supreme Court case which established the doctrine of judicial review. In short this doctrine means that the judicial branch of government has the final say on constitutional matters. This was linked to revolutionary ideas about checks on untrammeled executive power, which was a major motivating factor for many of the revolutionary leaders.

Given that introduction to the case, and given the fact that I knew judicial review had been a bedrock principle of American Constitutional law for a couple of centuries I was surprised to discover a little while ago that the principle had become somewhat controversial among the "Men in Black" anti-judicial activism crowd. Well, a few articles have higlighted a trend that shows you don't need to explicitely overrule the Supreme Court's review power to establish another branch of government as supreme in the constitutional order. Bush is doing quite nicely by just ignoring the court.

I first came across the issue of president signing statements in discussions about the nomination of Alito as a Supreme Court judge. At a fundamental level signing statements are fairly innocuous. They are simply pieces of paper which the president signs as he is signing a piece of legislation into law which outline his views on the constitutional status of the law. The president has sworn to uphold the constitution, so this in and of itself isn't a bad thing:

It is not necessarily an outrage for the president to run the government according to his own interpretation of the Constitution. And it is certainly not an outrage for the president to simply state his view and then do nothing about it.
...
[N]ailing him simply for stating his views on a constitutional issue, without even asking whether those views are right or wrong, is wrong.

The problem seems to be that Bush isn't simply stating his views on unclear constitutional issues, his administration has adopted a unitary-executive Constitutional theory and he's using signing statements to implement that theory. One of the troubling aspects of this theory is the assertion that Congress is unable to regulate the way the executive carries out its tasks. So, for example, congress wouldn't be able to limit the executive's warmaking power. A recent Boston Globe piece highlights a number of congressional limits on the the executive's warmaking powers which Bush has said he will ignore. This includes the statement saying he can ignore the recent McCain anti-torture amendment as well as others relating to wiretapping, anti-narcotics wars in Colombia and capture/detention of "enemy combatants."

The trouble with this is that it completely overturns the established constitutional order that has both served the US well for the past few centuries and is well in tune with the historical and contiuing antipathy of the populace to unchecked, monarchical, executive power. Given the workload of the Supreme Court, executive branch secrecy in these matters and strict limitations on the class of people who have standing to challenge executive branch breaches of the constitution, if the executive asserts even an obviously wrong constitutional position and then acts on it, that position will in all likelhood be the way things work for half a decade or more. Rather than deferring, roughly, to the Supreme Court in interpreting the constitution and then seeking to positively challenge congressional restrictions on power that are seen as unconstitutional, acting upon signing statements in this way means that the executive becomes the de facto king of the constitutional order.

I think it would surprise many Americans if they learned that their elected representatives could pass laws like the anti-torture amendment with overwhelming public and constitutional support, only to have them ignored in practice for 5 years or more until someone figured out what was going on, found someone who had been tortured who has standing to sue in an american court, brought action in a federal court and appealed sucessfully to the Supreme Court. And given that Bush is the guy appointing the members of the Supreme Court, it's no guarantee that the existing understanding of the Constitution and executive powers will stay static. Bush may not be king yet, but monarchical powers could well be a legacy he bequeaths on his sucessor.

Politicising Disasters

2006-05-03T15:07:00.000+09:30

Natural disasters, tragedies, accidents and other bad events are prime opportunities for opposition parties to attack the incumbent government. Such criticism inevitably results in cries of outrage from the other side, decrying this "politicising" of a disaster. There's two recent examples of this from the southern states of Australia. The Victorian opposition picked up a worthy cause after a train crossing accident in Victoria:

Country level crossings were "death traps" and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau should be called in to investigate the fatal collision between a high-speed V/Line train and a truck on Friday, Opposition transport spokesman Terry Mulder said yesterday.

Resulting in cries of feux outrage:

Yesterday, Mr Batchelor rejected Opposition calls for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau to investigate the crash.

He said comments by Liberal transport spokesman Terry Mulder were "just plain wrong".

"I think the comments that the Opposition have made here in Victoria are quite frankly disgusting," Mr Batchelor said.

"I was there on Friday at the crash site and at the hospital … I don't think it's appropriate for the Liberal Party here to be trying to make political mileage."

And when the federal opposition attempted to make a political point over a mine collapse in Tasmania:

The opposition leader has said the safety training received by trapped miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb has helped them survive, and such union-led training would not be delivered under the government's new workplace reforms.

The federal workplace minister pulled out the old "apologise!" chestnut:

"This again proves that Mr Beazley has just blundered into this without getting his facts right.

"The real issue is that Kim Beazley got it wrong, he was insensitive about it and he should apologise."

Mr Andrews said the government's Work Choices legislation left occupational health and safety in the hands of state and territory governments.

Now, there's not too much to say on each of these individual issues. As I hinted earlier, I think level crossings are an aspect of public transport that needs genuine work in Victoria, but I can't see it getting to the point where every rural level crossing is turned into an overpass. There's definately an argument for better signalling on such crossings, though. As for Kevin Andrew's assertion that safety is a state issue, he's right, but he completely missed Kim Beazley's point. It seems that another one of the new "freedom"-enhancing contractual restrictions brought about by the new IR laws is that union safety training clauses can no longer form a part of workplace agreements. I'm not sure how applicable such safety training is to situations like that in Tasmania (the opposition says it was crucial, I don't know if I believe them but maybe) but that sounds like a fair point to make to me - workplace accidents might increase with less safety training.

Anyway, the incumbent government's outrage in these and countless other examples attempts to draw on some apparently inviolable principle that you're not allowed to politicise tragedies. Rubbish. Nothing ever happens in the political realm without tragedies to focus the public's attention. What's wrong with using a human disaster to highlight a particular problem? Obviously you've got to be sensitive to the victims' relatives in doing so, but there should be no stigma attached to trying to make political mileage off an issue which has been brought to light by a particular disaster.

Equally obviously there should be some connection between the issue you're bringing up and the issue you're linking it to. So, for example, placing anti-union provisions in an otherwise unrelated homeland security bill in order to get Democrats to vote against homeland security legislation they originaly wrote so that you can make political mileage by painting Democrats as soft on the perpetrators of 9/11 is the very, very wrong type of politicising a disaster. But there's nothing wrong, in principle, with the response of opposition parties to the disasters outlined above.

Picture of the Week

2006-05-01T10:49:00.000+09:30

Guns being destroyed under Australia's gun buy-back 10 years ago:

When Howard retires (2011 or so :) there will be much talk about his legacy. For me, one of the most positive things he'll leave behind is a massive reduction in the number of firearms in the community, a reduction which has caused a correspondingly large reduction in gun related deaths. Obviously it's still possible for criminals to obtain guns and gun related violence still exists in the community. But this enormous reduction in the number of guns in the community has taken such violence even further outside the mainstream. I see gun ownership as a prisoner's dilemma. If others can own very lethal weapons then I feel like I have to own a gun too to keep up with the arms race. But then everyone has a gun and so no one is safer in a confrontation with another person than they were before buying a gun, and the total killing power in the community has gone up and so everyone's less safe.

Gun control offers a way to the most socially desirable outcome - everyone disarmed. It's the most socially desirable because then no one wastes money and effort on weapons which are neutralised by everyone else having the same weapons, and also because the capacity to commit fatal acts is reduced overall (knives simply don't have the 'completion' ability of guns). So a sincere thanks to Howard for catalysing scenes like that above.

Oh, and Snopes does a good job debunking the US gun lobby's distortion of statistics in relation to the Australian job ban, and the figures cited in the Age piece I linked above further demolish their deceptive arguments.

Quote of the Week

2006-04-29T11:16:00.000+09:30

Being someone extremely ambivalent about nationalism and patriotism, the mindset where this sort of comment comes from is simply incomprehensible to me. Hugh Morgan, going off against people with dual citizenship:

"I am convinced that if we took Australian citizenship seriously, we would not tolerate this bipolarity. If you are an Australian then that should be the end of the matter
...
If your loyalties are to another country and Australian citizenship is merely a convenience, then you should hand in your Australian passport and feel content that your loyalties and your passport are in accord one with the other."
...
Mr Morgan said Australians with dual citizenship had only qualified commitment to its future sovereignty and independence. "That is something that we in our strategic position cannot afford," he said.

Mind you, the Liberal party looks like it's tapping into that same sort of sentiment with discussion about compulsory language and citizenship tests for immigrants. My thoughts on cultural tests are pretty clear - they're a waste of time and a meaningless hurdle to place in front of potential immigrants. Learning by rote the sort of things which would be asked in such a test does nothing to help immigrants understand contemporary Australian life and do nothing to help them integrate.

I also think language tests are a bad idea, but for different reasons. Unlike generic historical/political knowledge, I think language skills are important for immigrants to have. I don't believe in the model of multiculturalism which I've heard described as pluralistic monoculture where immigrants are expected to transplant their various cultures and live in isolated communities in perpetuity. True multiculturalism involves a dialogue between and a mixing of cultures, not just ships sailing past each other in the night accompanied by some exchange of foodstuffs. I'm not at all suggesting that the government should attempt to forcibly integrate communities or actively seek to suppress immigrant cultures. I just think that the ideal of multiculturalism involves more than having a bunch of monocultural communities living in the same country.

Language is almost inevitably the starting point for this sort of exchange. A lack of English skills are an immediate and strong barrier to any attempt by either immigrants or existing residents from other cultures to interact in any meaningful way. So I agree that language skills are important things for immigrants to seek.

But a compulsory test isn't the way to go. I think most immigrants do want to learn English and recognise that they have to learn it in order to function as a normal citizen. In my experience, the people who don't learn the language are (now elderly) stay-at-home mothers of immigrant families who migrated a long time ago and never really left the house except for native-language religious/community activities and non-language intensive shopping. In these circumstances, it is often the man who decided to immigrate for work-related reasons and he and the second generation do learn Enlish and integrate to some degree. I can't see any reason to penalise families in such circumstances by stopping them from immigrating. I think most immigrants do want to learn English, and we should facilitate this through the provision of language education, but I don't think it's a good idea to prevent those who don't from entering the country on a permanent basis.

Income and Capital – Ending the Class Divide: Part 1

2006-04-27T15:37:00.000+09:30

This is in a slightly more formal style than usual because it's written for Farrago. Unlike previous times I didn't post the piece here first then modify it for magazine format. This contains background issues and the broad outline of a tax reform idea I like - ending preferential tax treatment of capital gains - I'll do a followup post on this blog which will actually address the arguments given in favour of special capital gains treatment. There was no space to do so in the Farrago piece.

Economists believe that tax reform comes in cycles. The theory is that every decade or two the existing tax system becomes so full of loopholes, exceptions, irrational distinctions and complicated rules that the public rises up and demands that the system get a complete overhaul. According to the theory, politicians eventually give in to these calls, make some fundamental changes to the tax system and everything is peachy until the cycle begins again. The textbook example of this is the tax reform fever which swept through western governments of all stripes throughout the 1980s.

Well, if the opinion and business sections of newspapers reflect the public’s mood then a tax reform storm is brewing in Australia. Well, it’s called tax reform but many groups seem to just be calling for some tax-tinkering. The main ideas which are being pushed, by groups like the Business Council of Australia, are a reduction in the top marginal tax rate and some degree of simplification. And even that sort of minor (not to mention regressive) reform idea isn’t being picked up with by a government which seems more interested in riding out a global resources boom than tackling the exceptional complexity of our tax laws.

Even if you believe nothing else that business groups, conservative think tanks and wealthy professionals say, you should believe them when they complain about the complexity of Australia’s tax laws. Our tax laws are full of incomprehensible provisions, meaningless distinctions, complex definitions and incredibly poor drafting. Not to mention the sheer weight of legislation - the Income Tax Acts alone are almost 10,000 pages long.

This complexity creates real economic and equity problems. On the economic side of things, Australians waste billions of dollars in hiring tax professionals to arrange their affairs to either figure out what they are obligated to pay or to minimise their liabilities. They also waste billions of dollars on activities which wouldn’t create economically meaningful returns if it weren’t for the tax system. The trend a couple of years ago of clear felling native forests (in places like Gippsland) to take advantage of the tax benefits from planting trees is an absurd but unfortunately indicative example.

As far as equity goes, it’s unfortunately true that the people most able to take advantage of loopholes in the tax system are people who aren’t salary and wage earners. While little can be done (beyond an input-tax credit GST system and more stringent auditing) to bring the black market cash services economy into the tax system, real gains could be made at the financial planning end of town.

Tax avoidance is facilitated, at a fundamental level, by differential tax treatment of income from different sources. Once you tax two transactions or receipts in different ways you create an incentive for people to shape their income so that it is in the lowest tax form. Perhaps the most fundamental difference which creates different tax consequences is the distinction between ‘ordinary income’ and capital gains.

It might surprise many people to learn that this difference was invented, in Australia, by judges. When judges first had to interpret Australia’s 1936 income tax act they were not guided in their interpretation by a clear statutory definition of income. So they borrowed a concept from another area of law – trust law – and held that income properly defined was the ‘fruit’ of the capital ‘tree’. If the tree grew bigger, and was subsequently sold for a profit, that gain wasn’t income and thus was not taxed. Australia only began taxing those gains in the 1980s and even then it was at a preferential rate. The difference between income and capital tax rates moved back towards its historical norm when the capital gains tax rate was effectively halved in the late 90s.

This distinction is necessary for trust law purposes. Take a testementary trust (created by a will) which leaves, say, a piece of investment property to a man's son's but the income from the property to his wife while she lives. Judges had to develop a useful concept of income in these circumstances to determine who got what. However, despite what you might hope, the distinction as far as income tax goes is not economically rational and is not founded on any sound public policy basis. The economic definition of income, the idealised ‘Haig-Simons’ conception, is simply the increase in a person’s consumption power over a period of time.

Under that definition all increases in wealth, whether from salary income, gifts, prizes or capital gains would be treated identically for the purposes of income tax. This definition, in its strong form, does not form a practical base for tax policy. For example, taxing unrealised capital gains (the increase in value of a person’s unsold property) is administratively unworkable. However it can be used to support an elimination in the different tax treatment of capital and income receipts.

Such a move would drastically simplify tax laws. No longer would there be arguments about whether a property sale was a profit making venture or an enterprising realisation of an asset or whether an exclusive employment clause was the sale of a capital asset or a different form of income. No longer would different tax consequences flow from receiving a employer pension payment fortnightly or annually. And no longer would individuals and companies expend an enormous amount of effort in making their income receipts look like capital receipts, which can be done in so many ways under the current laws. Additionally, parliament would no longer have to make the tax laws ever more complicated to try and stop such abuse.

Such a radical reform would dramatically improve the progressive nature of the tax system by treating those who obtain their income from capital and from wages equally. It would also result in a massive windfall gain to treasury which could be used to fund a dramatic, across the board, reduction in income tax rates. If such a reform package were implemented we could reduce our top marginal tax rate to well below international average and still make the tax system fairer, not to mention reduce the economic dea/d weight loss associated with our absurdly complicated tax system. What’s not to like?*

*This is not a rhetorical question, and it's one I'll tackle when I get around to writing my next post on this.

War on Fat: Round 1

2006-04-26T12:48:00.000+09:30

Given the Victorian government's announcement of a soft drink ban in public high schools, this Slate piece from a couple of weeks ago is somewhat prophetic:

[The campaign against junk food] will rely on three arguments: First, we should protect kids. Second, fat people are burdening the rest of us. Third, junk food isn't really food.

Targeting kids is a familiar way to impose morals without threatening liberties. You can have a beer or an abortion, but your daughter can't. The conservative aspect of this argument is that you're entitled, as a parent, to decide what your kids can do or buy. That's the pitch Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, made last week in a bill to crack down on junk food in schools. The liberal half of the argument is that kids are too young to make informed choices. In this case, it's true. Studies show that little kids ask for products they see on television; fail to distinguish ads from programs; and are heavily targeted by companies peddling candy, fast food, and sugared cereal.

This stage of the fat war will be a rout. In schools, the audience is young and captive, and the facts are appalling.

In Victoria, at least, this prediction seems correct. Interestingly, the Victorian ban only applies to State schools which creates the potential for some very interesting cross-sectional research. I reckon that studying the effect of this ban on the weight of public school students when measured against their soft-drink-drinking private school peers would be an interesting project (obviously you'd have to account for distorting variables such as socio-economic status).

The Age article above noted that the ban doesn't apply to fruit drinks "even if they have as much naturally occurring sugar as some of the "worst" soft drinks". I think that little aside is a bit misleading, given that fructose (the sugar in fruit) is low GI and thus not as likely to make you fat. Having said that, I found at least one study which found that fruit drinks have a similar obesity effect to soft drinks, though I don't know if "added sugar" fruit drinks were included in the fruit juice category. I think the arguments for banning the added sugar form of fruit drinks from high schools would be at least as strong as that for soft drinks.

There's evidence that this is the beginning of the wedge Saletan describes in that piece. Already groups are calling for the school ban to be widened, with the AMA's apparently calling for "water to be the only drink available at schools." That seems bizzare, even puritan, to me. Surely there's nothing overly pernicious about diet soft drinks, flavoured mineral water and chocolate milks (though, maybe I should check the labels on some of them).

On a strictly theoretical level I must admit that it's difficult to distinguish the arguments which could be used for things like extra taxes on junk food and restricted general availability from the arguments used to support the same restrictions on tobacco. But on a practical and intuitive level, I think it's not too hypocritical to support those sort of anti-tobacco measures (which I do) and not do the same with respect to junk food (which I don't).

For one, administering a specific excise on unhealthy foods would be an administrative nightmare. There is simply not enough certainty in the science about the health effects of various foods to draw strict dividing lines between junk and non junk. Look at the ever shifting status of cholestoral (eg. eggs might not increase heart attack risk), various types of fat (though there is something of a consensus that trans-fats are bad), caffiene and alcohol. Not to mention that small doses of most bad things probably aren't bad for you, and might even be good for you. Despite decades of water-muddling by the tobacco industry, the health effects of cigarettes are pretty clear. The health effect of a vast number of foodstuffs is not clear enough to form the basis for any sort of penalising tax.

Beyond that is the intuition that Saletan picks up on:

But somehow, "the food industry" doesn't sound quite as evil as "the tobacco industry." Something about food—the fact that it keeps us alive, perhaps—makes its purveyors hard to hate. For that matter, the rationale for recent bans on smoking is the injustice of secondhand smoke, and there's no such thing as secondhand obesity. Last year, a Pew Research poll found that 74 percent of Americans viewed tobacco companies unfavorably, but only 39 percent viewed fast-food companies unfavorably. This week, a Pew survey found that more Americans blame obesity, especially their own, on lack of exercise and willpower than on "the kinds of foods marketed at restaurants and grocery stores."

Small actions targetting vulnerable, captive, populations like school students aren't too worrying. I think he's right that the public will resist measures to curb obesity in the general population that go beyond education and that suits me fine.

The Post-Colonial Dilemma

2006-04-24T16:23:00.000+09:30

I loved this opinion piece in The Age last week. It was about the latest outburst of violence in the Solomon island's and Australia's response to it. It seems that we've been simultaenously doing too much and not enough there:

The violence that erupted on the streets of Honiara on Tuesday exposed the alarming depth of social unrest in a nation that is one of Australia's nearest neighbours. It also revealed the failure of Australia's $850 million, three-year endeavour to restore lasting peace and democracy to the Solomons after a decade of upheaval.

But the mess in the Solomons is just one manifestation of a deeper malaise in Australia's management of its relationships across the South Pacific. And the Howard self-perception of Australia as the rich and powerful neighbour duty-bound to impose order on the restless natives in the backyard - couched in language that presumes a right as much as a responsibility in "our part of the world" - is part of the problem.
...
Howard is correct when he says Australia has no choice but stay the course in helping try to resolve the shambles. A good start would be to recognise that sending in men with guns is no substitute for a serious and wide-ranging effort to fight corruption and economic injustice.

I'm really not sure what the writer is suggesting here. It seems that while we have to send in troops with guns to places like the Solomons in times of crisis like this, that isn't enough. We should do things like spend $850m over three years in a comprehensive democracy and anti-corruption program. Oh. And don't forget that sending aid money isn't enough:

Increasingly, our aid is seen as self-serving - fighting brush fires in places such as the Solomons and the once-more restive Bougainville while failing to make headway in helping combat chronic problems of corruption, poverty and unemployment that underpin and feed endemic instability.

We should instead use the aid money as part of a comprehensive democracy and anti-corruption program, I suppose. Which is kind of what we've been trying to do, but hey.

Following the sentence "the recent record speaks for itself" he recites a litany of slights given by the Howard government to our Pacific neighbours. These range from important issues of genuine concern (a Pacific guest workers program) to trivial things which the government hardly has anything do to with (the PNG PM getting his shoes searched at the airport). But there's a deeper issue here. The writer is obvioulsy uncomfortable that some of Howard's rhetoric sounds distinctively colonial. But what he's in favour of sounds pretty colonial too, even if he avoids using such obviously colonialist rhetoric. He sees that Australia has a moral debt to help out poor/corrupt/failing states in our neighbourhood. I agree. He thinks that help needs to be more than just aid payments and should involve helping the local security forces directly in times of trouble. I agree. He also thinks that we should try and intervene in those country's political systems to help reduce corruption and promote democracy. I agree.

But there's some cognitive dissonance going on if he thinks he can stay stuff like that and not sound like a colonialist. If he was arguing that our intervention in the Solomon islands was purely self interested he might be able to make the argument that our attitudes towards them are colonial. But I haven't seen any evidence of us trying to extract their massive/non-existent national resources so it's really hard to slot our activities into that colonial picture. And yet we still sound like colonialists (is that a word?) when we talk about going in to help them improve their government and restore stability. Unfortunately, that's unavoidable but to think of that as a serious problem is to treat the real harm of colonialism as lying in paternalistic rhetoric and not in genuine exploitation. In short I fail to see the dichotomy he attempts to create in his conclusion as valid:

It would also be helpful to stop regarding the task as some kind of neo-colonial burden and approach it in a spirit of partnership and mutual benefit that upholds the dignity - and sovereignty - of those we seek to assist.

If you go and intervene in another country's political system, with targetted aid, governance programs and military forces where necessary you're going to sound (and look) superficially colonial. That doesn't mean we're not approaching these issues in a spirit of 'partnership and mutual benefit' unless we're actually undermining the other country's interests.

Going Nucular

2006-04-22T08:31:00.000+09:30

I've read a few interesting articles on nuclear power recently, but unfortunately I don't have time to fully dissect and analyse them so I'm just gonna link and give brief summaries.

First up was this WaPo OpEd from a co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore. He gets that title because he was on Greenpeace's maiden protest voyage and heavily involved with the organisation in its formative 70s years through to the mid 80s when he grew disillusioned with the organisation's stance on a number of issues. In the article he presents a strong case for nuclear power on environmental grounds and dismisses the usual criticisms of it.

A front page Kos piece immediately sprung in to attack the man while studiously avoiding any discussion of the substantive issues. The diary accused Moore of being a shill for corporate interests by accepting money from and praising just about every industry which is the target of greenie ire. Interestingly the writer acknowledges that there is no known link between Moore and the nuclear industry which kind of makes me wonder what the point of the piece was. Wired magazine has a much more balanced piece on Moore and I think its safe to say that even if corporate money does affect his opinions, they are rooted in genuine beliefs and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

The Age also printed a comprehensive anti-nuclear power opinion piece (under the very flimsy pretext that "the Government [ha]s embarked on another mendacious, ill-advised, and downright dangerous enterprise: transforming Australia into a nuclear-powered, uranium-exporting nation"). It presents a few arguments which I know to be highly misleading and a few that I don't know enough about to evaluate. In the former category is the claim that if you take into account mining and transporting uranium and building nuclear power plants nuclear power doesn't actually emit much more CO2 than coal. New Scientist had a look these claims a while ago and it's true, but only if you take those factors out of the coal equation and simply measure the emissions caused by burning coal to the total emissions of the nuclear process. You gotta mine/transport coal and build coal plants too and nuclear power doesn't cause significantly more emissions than coal in those processes (though mining uranium does cause somewhat more emissions).

And finally, there's controversy over Chernobyl's death toll. This has long been something of interest to me, after I read a Bolt piece which came up with the incredible figure of zero deaths from the accident, beyond workers directly involved in the cleanup. The Moore piece linked above puts the number at 56. Both figures strike me as dishonest understatements. The most recent WHO study (September 2005) claims that about 4000 deaths can be attributed to the fallout from the plant. However, this figure has been criticised for being far too narrow in scope as it makes no attempt to measure deaths outside certain parts of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. So, for example, it ignores the 5000 deaths in neighbouring countries predicted in another WHO study. Two UK radiation scientists put the total number at 30-60,000 deaths. Greenpeace has also recently announced another estimate of the death toll - 93,000 - which is criticised by WHO as an overstatement (eg. "Mr Haertl questioned Greenpeace's estimated 10 per cent death rate for thyroid cancers among children and adolescents. "We actually know the death rate is 1 per cent. They are overstating the figures," he said.").

In all this mess of confusing and contradictory facts it's really difficult for the average member of the public to make a rational assessment of the costs and benefits of nuclear technology. I'm open to it in principal but I think I'd have to do a fuller investigation of competing claims before making a final assessment.

PS. "Nucular. It's pronounced Nucular."

Picture of the Week

2006-04-22T08:23:00.000+09:30

This cartoon won a Pulitzer Prize this year:

It's impressive less for it's message than the fact that the image is made up of the names of each of the 2000 dead soldiers, which makes this an impressive feat of endurance if nothing else.

Quote of the Week

2006-04-19T11:46:00.000+09:30

From The Economist, in true Economist style:

IN FRANCE the nation's youth marched for the right to work half-heartedly and not be sacked. By contrast, hundreds of thousands of immigrants in more than 100 American cities marched for a chance to work hard and not be deported.

Big Government Conservative Watch Part XXVI

2006-04-17T22:54:00.000+09:30

You know, I'm really glad I live in Australia a lot of the time. Sure we have political scandals and the odd scheme which has a whiff of corruption, but we don't have a thing on the Americans. Here's exhibit number [something big] for the case in point:

BM, for example, is banking a $2.8 billion refund—well, better to call it a "tax savings"—because instead of paying the normal corporate tax rate of 35 percent on $9.5 billion in profits it earned overseas, the company paid only 5.25 percent. That's the magic of the American Jobs Creation Act, a piece of legislation that passed with comfortable margins in both the House and the Senate and was signed into law by President Bush just two weeks before the 2004 elections.
...
According to its annual report for 2005, the company added fewer than 400 jobs worldwide last year to its workforce of 329,000 people. At the same time, IBM shed 5 million square feet of space in the United States, making it highly unlikely that any of those jobs were added in the U.S. Indeed, numerous news reports, including this Business Week article, put IBM's head count in India at close to 40,000 at the end of 2005, more than a fourfold increase over the 9,000 reported at the end of 2003.
...
At Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that announced the single largest repatriation—$37 billion—the one-time windfall works out to approximately $11 billion. That kind of tax savings buys a lot of $600-an-hour lobbyists, though not, apparently, many scientists and salespeople. In its annual report, Pfizer doesn't list employees by region. But the company's total head count dropped to 106,000 at the end of 2005, about 8 percent fewer jobs than at the end of 2004.

As the article explains, the program has resulted in tax savings of about $100bn and had no discernable impact on jobs creation. The other problem, not noted in the article, is that by using the tax system as a vehicle for this expenditure, Bush can actually make it look like he's reducing the size of the government (by reducing tax receipts) when he's really just increasing government spending by going further into debt to pay for this rort. Like I said, I'm just glad that the size of a routine piece of pork barreling isn't 12 digits in Australia.

Oh, and in other US tax news - increasing income tax increases government revenue. I know, it's not news to you and me, but it is actually news to Supply-Siders who live in a magical fairly land where "tax cuts raise revenues" (unfortunately my discussion in the comments there has got wiped, but it was surreal at the time).

I Take it Back...

2006-04-17T10:28:00.000+09:30

Well, I might have overestimated the government on its refugee policies. Last time I posted, I was somewhat hopeful that there would be no substantive change in refugee policy due to Indonesian pressure over the West Papuan asylum seekers but it seems that hope was misplaced. In an apparently drastic over-reaction, the whole of mainland Australia is now excised from our migration zone and all refugees will be moved to off-shore "processing facilities". Even if they are found to be genuine refugees we still won't accept them until the government has tried to resettle them somewhere else. I'm not sure that the way these changes have been explained is the way they will operate in practice (where else would we try to place genine cases? How long will we look for? What sort of scrutiny will there be of offshore facilities?), but this seems like a wholesale abandonment of any genuine commitment to accepting real refugees who arrive by boat from West Papua or anywhere else and I now regret the glimmer of hope I felt when the 42 West Papuans were granted asylum.

Health Care and Economics

2006-04-13T10:20:00.000+09:30

I ran across this post recently which sums up the two positions on government provided health care quite nicely, I think. First it quotes Sullivan:

One reason we have a healthcare cost crisis is that the genius of American consumers is kept at arm's length in the healthcare universe. If you establish a base minimum of insurance, subsidize individuals who need financial help, and mandate a universal requirement, you then force everyone to pick and choose from a variety of insurance plans in an insurance "exchange". Inevitably, in such an exchange, you're going to have intermediaries trying to sell various policies, market them, and provide clear consumer advice about what's in them. You get a real market, in other words, where consumers can see trade-offs and make sane decisions.

And then replies:

The "genius" of American consumers? I had no idea that the enthusiastic consumption of total crap qualified us for membership in Mensa. Alright, let's go through this, but slowly: Health care, as it stands, is a supplier's market, which is to say that the suppliers of medical technology and health services exert far more power than individual, or aggregate, consumers of health goods. Sullivan's implication is that this power imbalance is a simple trick o' the light, easily fixed by forcing individuals to bear more risk.
...
The problem here is that health care is not a traditional good... If your wife has aggressive breast cancer, but you think the drug Avastin, which costs $100,000, is excessively priced, you don't get to wait around. Your wife. Will. Die. And Genentech, Avastin's producer, knows that. Genentech can wait for you to come around, but you can't wait for Genentech to be visited by the ghosts of Christmas past. So they will win, and you will lose.
...
The secret of the American consumer is not genius, but market share. There are so many of us, and we have so much money, that when banded together we can force enormous efficiencies and cost-savings out of suppliers.

I'm in the latter camp - health care is not a market. The economist who pretty much launched health economics, "Nobel" prize winner Kenneth Arrow, explained why a few decades ago:

He argued that the medical care system was set apart from other markets by several special characteristics, including these: a demand for service that was irregular and unpredictable, and was often associated with what he called an "assault on personal integrity" (because it tended to arise from serious illness or injury); a supply of services that did not simply respond to the desires of buyers, but was mainly shaped by the professional judgment of physicians about the medical needs of patients (Arrow pointed out that doctors differ from vendors of most other services because they are expected to place a primary concern for the patient's welfare above considerations of profit); a limitation on the entry of providers into the market, resulting from the high costs, the restrictions, and the exacting standards of medical education and professional licensure; a relative insensitivity to prices; and a near absence of price competition.

But perhaps the most important of Arrow's insights was the recognition of what he called the "uncertainty" inherent in medical services. By this he meant the great asymmetry of information between provider and buyer concerning the need for, and the probable consequences of, a medical service or a course of medical action. Since patients usually know little about the technical aspects of medicine and are often sick and frightened, they cannot independently choose their own medical services the way that consumers choose most services in the usual market. As a result, patients must trust physicians to choose what services they need, not just to provide the services. To protect the interests of patients in such circumstances, Arrow contended, society has had to rely on non-market mechanisms (such as professional educational requirements and state licensure) rather than on the discipline of the market and the choices of informed buyers.

There's a couple of things I'd add to that. First, the usual economic arguments about pricing of services don't apply strongly to health care because the moral hazard associated with health insurance is likely to be small or non-existent in most situations. For those unfamiliar with economics (lucky you), moral hazard basically means that if you don't pay for the consequences of something you're more likely to take the risk that those consequences will result. The argument with respect to health care would be that if everyone had free, government provided health insurance then people would get sick/injured more often because they arnen't paying for the costs of their treatement. For the vast majority of diseases and injuries I'd say that that argument is clearly wrong with respect to people actually getting injured or diseased. Insuring people isn't going to increase the base line demand for medical care which eliminates one of the key justifications for pricing a product at market rates.

But this argument only goes so far. If people don't pay for any of their treatement they might demand more test and more treatement than they otherwise would. At some stage this becomes excessive and society starts wasting resources. But this isn't a reason to start charging people for their health care, it's an argument for a paternalistic model of health care provision. Despite what Sullivan believes, consumers aren't geniuses and psychologically can't be with respect to their own/their loved one's health. Given people's extreme risk aversion towards dying, they will overestimate their need for health care and if they were given full control over their treatment would demand too much. If they were paying for it out of their own pockets, this would result in wasteful spending by those who can afford it (encouraged by those profiting from their treatement) and those who can't afford it would either go without or go into crippling debt. The US, where health care is less regulated than elsewhere in the developed world is a case in point. While they spend far more on health care than anywhere else in the developed world (13.6% of GDP, 3% points clear of the 2nd highest spender and 5% points higher than the OECD average), they have poor to average macro health outcomes to show for it (see graph/table on page 4 here). While patients should have some control over their treatement, and should be given relevant information on risks etc. from their doctors, fundamentally the way to control spending on health services is to have a service-oriented professional ethic cobined with appropriate controls to ensure the system doesn't reward over-diagnosing doctors.

The other thing I'd add is that it's fundamentally unfair to force people to bear the costs of risks which they have little practical control over. As I said earlier, the survival instinct and the pain/suffering associated with illness is enough to discourage people from getting themselves intentionally ill/injured. That isn't to say people always act in the best interests of their health, it's just to say that forcing them to pay a lot of money on top of the existing consequences of sickness isn't going to convince them to act healthier. There's scholarly support for this intuitive proposition:

Theoretically, ex ante moral hazard (a reduction of preventive effort in response to insurance coverage) is not unambiguously predicted, and there is very limited empirical evidence about it

So having these risks shared among the community by a universal health care system is fair. If you were behind a Rawlsian Veil you would agree to sharing the risk of requiring medical treatement with the rest of society because you have little control over whether or not you will require such treatement. That empirical evidence suggests that aggregating the population's purchasing power helps keep down the cost of health care provision is an added bonus.

Bizzare Cranberries

2006-04-11T12:36:00.000+09:30

I did a case in trade marks the other week (see, I'm learning, I no longer spell it trademarks!) where the company Ocean Spray failed in its attempt to register the phrase "cranberry classic" because it wasn't distinctive enough. So when I saw someone with a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice at a family BBQ I checked out the label and was a bit surprised when I noticed the phrase Cranberry Classic TM in the (really long and pointless) product description/puff piece. So just now, cause I was bored in class, I decided to check the trade mark register to see if Cranberry Classic was registered and it wasn't. Turns out you don't need a registered trade mark to use the TM symbol.

Anyway, I'm sure you're thinking that that story isn't nearly interesting enough to justify a post and you're right. But I did discover that Ocean Spray's marketers are on some weird drugs when I did a full trade mark search for the company. Some of their ideas have fallen into misuse, like your body craves the wave, cran the wave and crantastic. But the weirdest ones remain. There's Cran Dude (who, presumably, is the trade mark pictured right - I wonder when the movie's coming out?) and made from a recipe squeezed out kids. I did not make that up. Ocean Spray has registered the phrase made from a recipe squeezed out of kids as a trade mark. I guess that's why the trade marked expect the unexpected too.

Update: The links seem to be temporary and I can't find solid ones so I deleted them.

Picture of the Week

2006-04-11T11:47:00.000+09:30

"Camp Sovereignty":

The Victorian government has obviously been very careful to avoid going Bjelke-Petersen on the Aboriginal protesters at our Commonwealth games and has received a little helping hand from a federal bureaucrat. Under the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 the relevant federal minister has the power to grant an injunction to prevent the destruction of significant Aboriginal heritage site.

9 Emergency declarations in relation to areas
(1) Where the Minister:
(a) receives an application made orally or in writing by or on behalf of an Aboriginal or a group of Aboriginals seeking the preservation or protection of a specified area from injury or desecration; and
(b) is satisfied:
(i) that the area is a significant Aboriginal area; and
(ii) that it is under serious and immediate threat of injury or desecration;
he or she may make a declaration in relation to the area.

(2) Subject to this Part, a declaration under subsection (1) has effect for such period, not exceeding 30 days, as is specified in the declaration.
(3) The Minister may, if he or she is satisfied that it is necessary to do so, declare that a declaration made under subsection (1) shall remain in effect for such further period as is specified in the declaration made under this subsection, not being a period extending beyond the expiration of 60 days after the day on which the declaration under subsection (1) came into effect.

This power is able to be delegated and it obviously has been because the declaration was granted by a federal heritage inspector. It seems like a pretty amazing decision to me. I'm not sure how a camp which was set up a couple of weeks ago has managed to attain 'significant' heritage status, but the decision by this inspector has the potential to prevent its removal for up to 60 days. It looks like the State Heritage Minister agrees, and I wouldn't be surprised if he launches an appeal against the decision (I'm guessing he'll have to rely on administrative law). The situation is obviously a fraught one, the protesters have genuine complaints to make and the image of them being dragged off by police wouldn't be a pretty one, but ultimately the camp isn't helpful for their movement. To quote someone with more authority to speak on this than me:

Wurundjeri elder Ian Hunter condemned the protest camp as a "disgrace", saying it harmed reconciliation efforts elsewhere in the community. "We're ahead of this. We don't need to be seen as a backward people who need to sit around a fire. We can negotiate as equals and move forward together."

Quote of the Week

2006-04-10T10:57:00.000+09:30

The drums of war seem to be beating faster with respect to Iran. I'd just like to channel an uncharacteristcally non-hawkish Hitchens in response:

All the war games and simulations that I have seen have concluded that it isn't possible to disarm Iran by airstrikes. Learning perhaps from what happened to Saddam's nuclear plant at Osirak, the authorities have dispersed the program widely and put a lot of it underground. Nor can the Israelis be expected to do much by proxy: They would have to fly over Iraq this time, and it would be even more obvious than usual that they were acting as an American surrogate. Professor Edward Luttwak claims, in the Wall Street Journal, that selective strikes could still retard or degrade the program, but this, if true, would only restate the problem in a different form.

This means that our options are down to three: reliance on the United Nations/European Union bargaining table, a "decapitating" military strike, or Nixon goes to China. The first being demonstrably useless and somewhat humiliating, and the second being possibly futile as well as hazardous, it might be worth giving some thought to the third of these.

I have heard it argued that the US's non-engagement, diplomatically, with Iran over the past few decades means that local anger at authoritarian rule hasn't been directed at the US, as it has in other middle eastern countries. But I'm not sure that the non-engagement is the best path anymore, and I'm pretty sure that diplomatic engagement along the lines Hitchens suggests in that piece is something which should at least be tried before the bunker-busting engagement begins.

West Papua Backpeddling

2006-04-08T20:30:00.000+09:30

Well, The Age is running heavily with stories apparently showing that the government is giving into Indonesian pressure over West Papuan asylum seekers. There's this:

THE Federal Government has moved to defuse tensions with Indonesia by reviewing the process for assessing future claims for refugee status by Papuan asylum seekers.

Prime Minister John Howard confirmed the review yesterday, saying it would consider whether Indonesia should have the opportunity to respond to future claims of persecution before decisions on refugee status are made

This:

JOHN Howard says most Australians do not want West Papuans seeking refuge here.

The Prime Minister also expressed relief yesterday that a West Papuan family had apparently landed in Papua New Guinea rather than reaching its destination of an Australian island.

"That's a good thing in the context of the relationship between Australia and Indonesia," Mr Howard told ABC radio.

And this:

The prize for the most ignorant contribution this week to an already muddied debate goes to Treasurer Peter Costello who told ABC radio: "West Papua has always been part of Indonesia. Ever since Indonesia has existed as an independent country West Papua had always been part of Indonesia whereas, East Timor, of course was not."

But, of course, nothing substantive has changed since the original decision. Indoneisa has stepped up naval patrols in the gap between West Papua and Australia, but past plans to conduct joint patrols have been put on the shelf. The 42 of the original asylum seeker's who have received temporary protection visas are still walking around, and seem to have received very expeditious treatement compared to the Middle Eastern and other asylum seekers who have spent years in refugee processing centres. Until something more substantial comes up, I'm inclined to think that the angle the paper seems to be running with on this story - that Howard wants to side with the Indonesian government and implicitely support repression in West Papua - is missing the point.

Howard is in a bind. Indonesia is genuinely concerned about the prospect of West Papuan independence for both nationalistic (domestic political) and strategic (the massively profitable mines) in the province. From a strategic and moral point of view Australia probably wouldn't mind if West Papua did a Timor. Not only is Indonesia's sovereignty claim over West Papua weak, from a strategic perspective independence would weaken Indonesia and open up a potentially wealthy and strong regional ally (if we could help them gain independence, Timor style). But we need Indonesia to remain a relatively friendly ally for all sorts of reasons trade, terrorism, people smuggling not to mention the chance to influence the development of the world's most populous predominately Muslim nation and an emerging democracy.

There's an obvious tension in these interests. The best way to deal with the tension could well be to be very diplomatic towards Indonesia and make as many non-fundamental concessions as possible while subtly sending hints that we're not totally opposed to West Papuan independence by treating refugees from the country fairly and promptly. It's too late to tell whether or not the concessions the government is making towards Indonesia are fundamental or not, but at the moment there's no strong indication that Howard is betraying the West Papuan asylum seekers to gain closer ties to Indonesia.

Unjust Laws and the Rule of Law

2006-04-05T12:13:00.000+09:30

It was good too see that Abdul Rahman, the Afghani Christian who was facing the death penalty under the country's less-than-liberal laws, got off on all charges and was accepted as a refugee in Italy. But the case highlights the tension between human rights and the rule of law, tensions which the US State Department is apparently unaware of:

Well, it's a case that we're following very closely and it's important, we believe, that the Afghan authorities conduct this trial and any proceedings that lead up to it in as transparent a manner as possible. Our view, certainly, as you know, and has been stated here as well as others places many, many times, is that tolerance, freedom of worship is an important element of any democracy and these are issues as Afghan democracy matures that they are going to have to deal with increasingly. I think that right now there's in Afghanistan some differing interpretations of the Afghan constitution. These issues rightfully should get resolved through the court system but they need to be resolved through -- resolved in a transparent manner and according to the rule of law. It is a case that we are going to following quite closely, though.

If the case was followed through in a transparent manner according to the rule of law through the Afghani court system the guy would have been sentenced to death by now. The rule of law is almost purely a procedural principle. Basically all the rule of law says is that judicial decisions should be based on the law and not according to the whim of the judge. Anything else would amount to retrospective application of a newly created rule, which is contrary to the rule of law (that sounds circular, but it's not, I'm just re-stating the definition). Other relevant aspects of the rule of law are transparency, openness and rational reasons for decision.

The way Abdul got off completely violated these principles. After massive international pressure, the Afghanistan government convinced prosecutors and the court to drop the charges by declaring Abdul mentally unfit to stand trial, apparently because he thought he could speak to the Christian God (which sounds suspiciously like the crime he was charged with, but anyway). The mistake made in that State Department quote above was to assume that the rule of law protects substantive rights which it doesn't.

Of course this isn't to say that the just outcome in this case would be for Abdul to have been killed, it's simply to note that the rule of law isn't an end in itself, it's only something to be applauded when the laws which are being enforced are just. You can't dodge the moral question of whether a punishment is justified by simply saying that a country has the right to enforce their own laws and that citizens/visitors who are put on notice of those laws have no right to complain when they're caught.

That, of course, was the argument put by more than a few people with respect to Nguyen Tuong Van, the Australian drug trafficker who was killed by the Singaporean government late last year. Because I'm too lazy to trawl further, here's an anonymous but I think representative summation of that sort of sentiment:

I do not smoke cigarettes so smoking is not allowed in our home. My neighbours smoke cigarettes so they allow smoking in their home. It is their home and it is their right.
I am not in favour of capital punishment in Australia but I do not believe it is correct for me to force my views on another country.
This guy went out of his way and break the well known laws of Singapore. He got his just deserts.
Let's hope his punishment is a lesson to us all.
Unfortunately I don't believe this will happen.

Anyone who took the position that Singapore was justified in killing Van because that's their laws was substantively supporting the death penalty for drug traffickers, period, unless they're consistent enough in their position to support the enforcement of laws such as the one which would have condemned Abdul to death. They can't hide behind the 'it's OK because it's the law there' position in the Singapore case, but not the Afghanistan case if all that can be used to measure the morality of a punishment is the rule of law. Now, I can't find any specific examples, but I'm betting that most of the people who thought we shouldn't have criticised Singapore for killing Nguyen aren't now criticising Afghanistan for letting Abdul go free and the only explanation for that is that they're judging the morality of the punishment by something more than mere procedure. That something more is some sort of universal natural laws/human rights concept, and that's where things get interesting. People relying on the rule of law to judge the rightness of punishments are usually trying to dodge that substantive question.

A Simple Idea

2006-04-03T10:53:00.000+09:30

Opposition parties tend to get a lot of flack for not having their own ideas. Often it's an unfair complaint because any ideas that opposition parties come up with are ignored by the media because it's not usually newsworthy to report on a plan which won't have any effect on public policy for the foreseeable future. Opposition parties and parliamentarians usually do come up with all sorts of ideas but they get routinely ignored. While researching an essay on tax simplification, I ran across one collection of Labor Reform ideas at Craig Emerson MP's web site. It had an interesting article by an ANU economist Andrew Leigh which advocated the abolishment of mandatory self reporting of income tax for taxpayers with simple affairs.

This isn't a new idea. New Zealand and the UK both moved away from compulsory self assessment in the 90s with great success. While very close to 100% of Australian taxpayers (67% of the adult population) submit a full assessment form, the figure is only 37% and 31% in the UK and NZ respectively. Self assessment was introduced in Australia in the mid 1980s and there's been academic calls for reducing its scope since the early 90s when a study by Pope revealed the reasonably high costs of complying with self assessment. The findings of this and other studies is that the average taxpayer spends about 8.5 hours a year filing out their tax return.

The total costs of complying with the Australian income tax system are reasonably high by international standards. While no studies have been done since the mid 90s, the paper by Leigh updates those studies by using more recent time valuation figures and works out that it costs individuals about $3bn a year to comply with their tax obligations. About 70% of those costs are time costs, but Leigh points out that the time savings alone of reducing the number of people who had to submit a tax return would be approximately equivalent to giving everyone an extra public holiday per year, which is a good thing.

Anyway, this is an idea which people should be able to get behind and I hope Labor run with it. If we could match NZ and the UK, potentially 60-70% of people who currently submit a tax return would no longer need to. Avoidance wouldn't be increased very much, if at all, because the people who wouldn't be submitting a tax return are salary and wage earners whose affairs can be tracked fairly easily. If you think about it, thanks to the PAYG system the tax office already has most of the information it needs to calculate tax liability - a lot of the stuff in your tax return is telling the tax office what they already know. The current system of getting a tax refund at the end of the year would continue in the same way, it's just you wouldn't have to ask for it.

The only complicated stuff for the average taxpayer might be deductions, which brings us to the interesting part of this proposal. The most comprehensive academic paper on this proposal was written by Chris Evans in 2004. Leigh is aware of the paper because he cites it. But he doesn't mention the crucial ingredient which Evans argued was needed to achieve really big reductions in the number of people who file a tax return - a wholesale reduction in the number of allowable income tax deductions. So, for example, NZ has an extremely limited number of allowable deductions which was the catalyst for the reporting reform.

I've made it clear before that I'm in favour of abolishing or seriously curtailing the income tax deductions system before, but it's an idea which neither of the major parties in Australia has been willing to seriously countenance. Too many people would be affected directly by it and the benefits to the community (from commensurate, broad, tax cuts and general efficiency gains) are fairly diffuse which is a recipe for political inaction. But you can't simplify people's tax affairs substantially without doing something about deductions, which is the only complicated part of most wage earner's tax affairs. The two ideas are intrinsically linked.

So is Labor's Craig Emerson advocating a wholesale reform of the income tax system? I don't think so. He's trying to have his cake - an electorally popular move to cut the number of people who have to file a tax return - and eat it too, by not mentioning that to get any real gains a more electorally dubious tax deduction overhall. But simplification of the personal tax system just looks like one more benefit of scrapping income tax deductions to me.

Quote of the Week

2006-04-01T10:01:00.000+10:30

Another "guess the source":

Now some young people have turned themselves into walking billboards for this odious multinational company, wearing T-shirts declaring "Fcuk this", "Fcuk me" and "Too busy to fcuk". I'm sure I am not alone in feeling concerned when I see a young woman walking down the street with a T-shirt that reads "f--- me". Why does she want to attract that sort of attention?

The burning question is why the majority of Australian adults, for whom the FCUK ads are offensive or disturbing, tolerate them.
...
After decades in which the boundaries of good taste have been breached over and over again, most people have simply resigned themselves to the intrusions and the colonisation of public spaces by the brash, tacky and the offensive.

I've pointed out before that socially conservative Family First Senator Steve Fielding and neo-marxist anti-consumerism activist Clive Hamilton can be confused. This time it's Hamilton doing the speaking and it's an interesting article and the perfume example he gives is pretty outrageous. But, as he points out, no one (particularly aging baby boomers) want's to be seen as a fuddy-duddy and so the marketing industry is given pretty much free reign to bulldoze over public sensibilities. Remember, FCUK is not expression, it's not art, it's crass commerce and there's no reason to rejoice in the fact that their billboards have managed to conquer the public sphere with nary a complaint.

Picture of the Week

2006-04-01T09:57:00.000+10:30

That deceptively promising picture I referred to in the previous post. From a Kos Diary:

Deceptive (with respect to the November election, anyway) because, unfortunately, Bush isn't on the ballot.

Another Piece of the Puzzle

2006-04-01T09:38:00.000+10:30

(Or should that be another lego brick in the wall? Anyway) I wrote last week that I think the mid-term picture for the Democrats might not look as good as current polling suggests (see the upcoming picture of the week). The main reason for this, I argued, was Democratic fragementation and lack of a message. I also mentioned the possibility that Republican congressmen/women could distance themselves from Bush but the only examples I gave of this were issues which have come and gone (Miers, Katrina, Dubai Ports) and probably won't have too much effect on a future-choice oriented election. These things might give a reason to not vote for Republicans, but they don't really give a reason to vote for them.

Well, Micky Kaus at Slate has painted a scenario which should probably become the conventional wisdom and will almost certainly be prohetic. The winning issue for Republicans? Immigration:

Immigration has several characteristics that suggest it's a good locomotive for GOP victory in November: 1) Voters say it's an important issue; 2) A majority wants some sort of border-control action; 3) The GOP base feels intensely about it; 4) Many Congressional Democrats are--by ideology or interest group pressure--locked in to a pro-immigrant, non-tough stance (or if they strike a tough pose it seems just that). In all these respects, immigration resembles welfare reform, a key hot-button base-mobilizing issue for Republicans in the 1994 midterms.

He goes on to point out the flaws with the usual arguments against Republican race baiting (eg. they'll lose the all important Latino vote for a generation) by pointing out that individual candidates can craft local messages and distance themselves from the pro-immigration noises being made by the party's putative leader (Bush) where it will have electoral impact. It might be depressing, but I think it's likely to be a winning issue for Republicans and one which will cause all sorts of problems for Democrats. I mean, the NYT's leading militant liberal columnist, Paul Krugman, came out against mass immigration:

I'm instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration.

But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration, and immigration from Mexico in particular. If people like me are going to respond effectively to anti-immigrant demagogues, we have to acknowledge those facts.

First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small. Realistic estimates suggest that immigration since 1980 has raised the total income of native-born Americans by no more than a fraction of 1 percent.
...
The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.

If Republicans attack on all relevant fronts on this issue, just wait for the Democrats to despreately try and run away from it in the lead up to November.

Circular Law

2006-03-29T12:45:00.000+10:30

Something that I'm sure strikes most law students as they progress through their study is the common judicial tactic of picking a preferred outcome and then reasoning backwards to reach this conclusion. This reasoning is inevitably strained, because judges never want to make it look like they're making new law, so they do amazing feats of logical gymnastics to fit their decision within the existing framework of existing common law tests (tests which themselves were created by judges, usually in the 1800s, but never mind that). Perhaps the most blatant and amusing examples of this is when judges employ circular logic, especially if they acknowledge that this is what they're doing but do it anyway.

One example is a 1999 case Wily v St. George Bank. The question for the judge was whether a type of security called a floating charge was a property right as opposed to a mere contractual right. The benefit of having a property right is that it is enforceable against third parties whereas a contract is only enforceable between the parties. In deciding whether or not the floating charge was property Sackville J decided to analyse whether or not the charge was enforceable against third parties. I'm not joking:

I think there is much to be said for the view that a useful test for determining whether a particular interest is proprietary in character, at least where the interest is created by agreement, is whether the holder is able to enforce the interest against third parties (as distinct from the other contracting party or parties).

Translated as the definition of whether or not an interest is proprietary in character is whether or not has proprietary characteristics (determined by whether or not it is proprietary in character, of course).

I ran into another corker last week in my trade marks class. To sustain an action for passing off (which is the common law protection for trade marks) you need to show that there was a misrepresentation of association between one product and another (to vastly simplify things) and that this misrepresentation caused some loss to the plaintiff. This loss is usually in the form of lost sales, damaged reputation and a diluted market for the product. There was an Australian case in 1960, Radio Corporation v Henderson, which began when Radio Corporation put out an album of dancing songs with the picture of the two most famous ballroom dancers of the time on the front cover.

The misrepresentation was pretty clear to see. Most people who saw it thought that the couple had endorsed the album or were associated with Radio Corp in some way. The loss, however, would appear to have been non-existent. The couple had no intention of putting out their own album and if anything benefited from the publicity. But the judge obviously didn't like Radio Corp 'free riding' off the couple's reputation in this way (and it was a somewhat sharp business practice) so that wasn't the end of the story. He found that there was a real loss – the loss of the right to licence their image to Radio Corp. Think about this. They only had that right if Radio Corp had to ask them for permission. But Radio Corp only had to ask them for permission if they could show loss from an unauthorised use. And the was only a loss if they had to ask for permission. Completely circular. It took 20 years for an Australian judge to admit it in the Koala Dundee:

Suppose such a driver has his car associated with an unlicensed product, as in Motschenbacher v R J Reynolds Tobacco Co (1974) 498 F 2d 821 There the tobacco company used a picture of a car looking like Motschenbacher's and put the name of its cigarettes on it. That conduct was held to be unlawful, at the suit of Motschenbacher, on the basis that people thought he had been sponsored by the cigarette company. But how was Motschenbacher or the public hurt by that? Motschenbacher's harm was that he was denied a fee which he would have charged; but he could only exact a fee if the law recognised his right to stop people using images associated with him — so the argument becomes circular. The real point is whether the right of property in his name and reputation as a driver is entitled to protection.

And while that judge was honest enough to admit that judges weren't just applying the traditional trade mark test in these sort of cases, but were picking their preferred outcome, he's the exception not the rule

To go on a tangent, these sort of cases are in an area of trade mark law dealing with the rights that celebrities have in their own image. Australia takes a fairly moderate stance in this respect, giving some rights for celebrities to protect their image from unauthorised use but not going as far as giving them a full property right. Many US States have gone a lot further, spearheaded by California of course. In about half of the US States celebrities have full property rights in their image. This leads to some absurd results.

For one, the protection is really wide. The lady who spun the Wheel of Fortune letters successfully defended a motion to dismiss her suit against Samsung when they made a futuristic ad featuring a number of things, one of which was a metallic robot in a blond wig spinning a futuristic wheel of fortune letter (they subsequently settled). Arnie sued a toy manufacturer for making a Bobbing Head Doll of his likeness and the manufacturers subsequently settled.

Then there's some bizarre consequences of having personality become property. Celebrities can sell their image rights and then can be prohibited from writing their own memoirs. If they go bankrupt they can be forced to sell them. A secondary market can develop in their image. It's all very weird and I'm glad Australia is a little less crazy than the US. Again.

The System Worked!

2006-03-29T10:11:00.000+10:30

It was fantastic to see our refugee processing system actually work for once last week, with the granting of temporary protection Visas to 42 asylum seekers from West Papua (the 43rd member of the group is still having his application processed). The case had been flagged as a diplomatic minefield ever since the refugees arrived, as it had the potential to disrupt our relationship with the Indonesian government, them being the ones committing alleged genocide in the province. The reality of this minefield was revealed after the decision, as the Indonesian government has actually withdrawn their ambassador. Hugh White (who is a fairly respected strategic analyst) is now warning that there could be long term harm to our relationship with the country. There's also calls from some of the more radical elements within Indonesia to put sanctions on Australia and/or cease military co-operation.

I have no doubt that the Australian government would have preferred that the refugees not landed here and that the whole issue could have been avoided. That political pressure was either not brought to bear on the DIMA or that such pressure was unsucessful in changing the outcome (for now anyway), is a sign that the system can work, at least sometimes, and that's something to be happy about. Not that we should forget about this, this or this, but credit where due.

Brave New World

2006-03-27T11:55:00.000+10:30

The new workplace laws officialy begin today and brave new world seems to be the descriptive phrase of choice. Two recently highlighted details of the law add more disturbing-ness to the existing mass of disturbing things about these laws - the minimum wage "averaging" and the workplace minister's apparent power to "disalow" sections of new workplace contracts. The averaging is pretty much what it sounds like:

Mr Hulls said the changes meant that if a minimum wage is $13 an hour, a worker can be paid $7 an hour for six months of the year at the whim of the employer as long as the minimum wage averages $13 over the full year.

The only effect of this change can be to reduce some wages below the (non) minimum wage. If an employee is employed for the whole year, their total doesn't go up. If an employee is dismissed after the slow period where the wage is below the minimum (perhaps to be re-hired at the normal minimum wage right after) then wages are reduced. And given that the whole point of the changes is that workplace contracts will be offered on an individual basis, employees hired during the busy period won't get paid the year-long-avergaging premium. The Federal Workplace Minister claims this isn't how it'll work:

Ian Hanke, spokesman for federal Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews, scoffed at Mr Hulls' claims, saying it was against the law to pay below the minimum wage and a worker would be entitled to be paid money owing to average out their wage to the minimum level if their employment were terminated.

So instead of getting paid $12 an hour, the employee facing the above situation will be paid $7 an hour for, say, 6 months and then get sacked and then have to sue their employer for the $5 and hour they didn't pay. Much better. Also, isn't it nice that that the cash flow problems caused by seasonal business are being shifted from business owners (with diversified sources of income, namely employees and other investments) to individual employees (who have much more limited sources of income). It's also nice that no one seems to care about this risk-shifting.

The "disallowing" power I referred to earlier is so bizzare that I'm not sure I quite believe it:

[The Workplace Minister] will also be able to strike out any clause that he does not like from a contract between a worker and their boss and will have broad emergency powers to order employees back to work.

As far as I can tell this power only refers to contracts approved by the Industrial Relations Commission. But it's still completely bizzare and totally disturbing. Why should an individual minister have the power to unilaterally modify contracts agreed to between worker and employer? When will it be used? Why hasn't there been any discsussion on this craziness?

There was an odd opinion piece in The Age last week which seems like either a bad joke or a misguided attempt to put a positive spin on the changes:

Please accept my resignation. It seems that in the brave new world of work that begins on Monday, my power in the workplace resides in quitting work. It's a power easily exercised. No red tape, no negotiations, no tricky turns of phrases or battling semantics in trying to discover what you really mean when you say A, B, C to me. Or I reply, Zgggrrrrhhh!
...
Who can fight against such a weapon? Imagine if workers of the world rose up as one to shout those two words. Dear employers, are you shaking in your boots?

I actually think that despite the flippant mannerisms, the writer is being serious here. He's actually trying to make an argument that workers are being empowered by the new changes because they will become more motivated to quit and that this is the ultimate power of workers. Of course, it is in the abstract. But we don't live in the abstract. I've said it before, but the power to quit is an illusionary one (especially when compared to the power to fire). The sorts of employees affected by these changes aren't highly demanded workers who have large incomes, useful skills and good negotiating power. They don't have reservoirs of savings which they can draw on while they look for a new job, they likely don't have a partner earning a six figure income and they also probably don't have a welfare safety net to fall back on because that got cut too. So quitting is a really bad thing for an employee cause they're left with very little income. It's also a bad thing for the employer, but not nearly as bad because they have diversified incomes and more capacity to cover the temporary income loss by having other employees (or themselves) work harder.

And the best part of it all is that most of the existing award agreements won't expire until three years from today which just so happens to be after the next election. Labor's gonna find it hard to make real traction on this issue at the next election because millions won't yet be affected, and by the time 2010/11 rolls around people will have forgotten what they no longer have.

Quote of the Week

2006-03-24T22:05:00.000+10:30

Yes, I was bored and browsing the nutty right wing blogs in my bookmarks. Another one I don't visit very often is Andre Landeryou's "The Other Cheek" (which he oh-so-hilariously abbreviates to The OC). Unlike LGF, I don't stay away so much cause he's full of hate but because he's full of this bizzare American style patriotism (he must be the only person I know to constantly talk about Australia's founding fathers and he has some kind of bizzare love affair with Sophie Panaopolis because he thinks she's a patriot cause she wants to persecute Muslims and wears the Australian flag, or something). He also has an an incredible ability to brew up hurricanes in thimbles:

Despite enjoying our billion dollar hospitality at the Comm Games, do gooder leftoid bike riding Canadians have banned the Australian tourism ad "Where the Bloody Hell Are You?"

It'd be funny if he didn't come across as dead serious and genuinely outraged.

Picture of the Week

2006-03-24T21:44:00.000+10:30

This is why I don't drop by the hate fueled world of the Little Green Football very often:

Normal people looking at this would see a fairly bland anti-racism poster, the sort that comes out of beuraucratic governmental organisations all the time. Little pieces make up the whole puzzle, racism can take different forms, building blocks make up a wall of hat, yada, yada. Not Charles Johnson, no. He sees this as proof positive that the UN is in league with the islamofascists because that red brick is Lego and Lego is Danish and there was recently a cartoon controversy in Denmark and so this brick means the UN is "on the wrong side of the cartoon jihad". Of course. And in case you needed proof... the poster is also printed in (get this) Arabic!!

My head hurts.

Update: I accidentally followed the clicky-link from that article to a Malkin article on the poster. Now my head really hurts:

With all due respect, those giving the U.N. the benefit of the doubt and advocating this benign interpretation are looking at the graphic bass-ackwards. The puzzle pieces represent unity and tolerance; the red LEGO represents a blaring, non-conformist, and unacceptable "shape of racism." Some readers write in that no one knows who makes Danish-based LEGO toy pieces. Have you all been snoozing through the Cartoon Jihad conflagration or what? If you can't see the poster for the Islamist-pandering piece of propaganda that it is, there's nothing I can do to help you.

November Ain't Looking Good

2006-03-22T14:22:00.000+10:30

Given various polling numbers and historical comparisons, there seems to be something of a conventional wisdom building that the Democrats are going to do well in this years mid-term US elections, though perhaps not well enough to take back either the House or the Senate. Here's one summary

GOP officials I've talked to expect the president's numbers to stay in the basement unless Osama Bin Laden is captured. Congress' approval rating hovers at around 30 percent, the same grim spot Democrats occupied when they were in charge in 1994. When voters are asked which party they are likely to vote for in their congressional election, they pick Democrats over Republicans by 14 points, even though the Democratic Party hasn't gotten it together on its message. Only 30 percent of those polled by the Los Angeles Times believe that the country is on the right track. That is such a historically low number it's a surprise Americans even get out of bed in the morning.

But in spite of these sorts of figures, there's also a lot of people warning not to count chickens yet. Given his misplaced and public optimism about the outcomes of the 02 and 04 elections, it was surprising to see Kos jump on this wagon a couple of days ago:

I was ridiculously optimistic the last two cycles, and saw that optimism shattered on election night. Democratic early numbers in both 2002 and 2004 were great. Not this great, but pretty darn good. And we saw how well the GOP closed. I don't take anything for granted anymore. And in fact, I assume they can make huge gains in the final days of an election. Add in the general sense of malaise that currently seems to inflict the Dem base, and I've got a bad feeling about this election.

He picks up on one aspect of the pessimism, that Democrats lack a defining message which can give people hope. A recent Slate article blamed this lack of a message on the party's insipid leaders:

Thus far, Pelosi, Reid, and Dean have been literally unable to develop such a national message for the party's congressional candidates. Not just a good message—any message. Their "legislative manifesto," originally promised for November, has been delayed more often than a flight on Jet Blue. When it eventually arrives, expect something benign and insipid. In 1994, Gingrich had the Contract With America. In 2006, Democrats will have another glass of merlot.

And to add to the picture, TNR highlighted an embarrasing recent stuff up by Pelosi:

When House Republicans announced back in September that they would conduct a special investigation into the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi predicted a "sham" inquiry and vowed that Democrats would have nothing to do with it. This instinct was not unreasonable, nor was her political strategy--trying to pressure Republicans into creating an independent panel modeled after the 9/11 Commission. But, once it was clear the GOP wouldn't budge, many Democrats urged Pelosi to let them join the House inquiry. It was better to cry foul from within than without, they said--and why let the GOP hog the spotlight?

Pelosi insisted her boycott strategy was best. That decision began to look dubious during the investigatory committee's high-profile hearings last December, which offered starring roles to Republican members like committee chairman Tom Davis and Christopher Shays of Connecticut.

This week, Pelosi's blunder became even more clear. The committee's report rips the Bush administration and makes Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff look incompetent. Democrats could only watch as committee Republicans basked in coverage that has portrayed them as brave truth-tellers and provided them with badly needed political distance from the unpopular Bush administration. News outlets from the Associated Press to CNN turned to Republicans like Davis and Shays--a moderate desperate to run away from the White House this fall--for quotes about last August's "national failure." The AP even took care to note that this was the man-bites-dog handiwork of a "Republican-dominated" panel. Meanwhile, Democrats found themselves in the odd position of praising Republicans for not delivering the whitewash they had predicted.

This also brings up the point that the well publicised defections by Republicans in congress from Bush don't actually matter for November. Bush isn't on the ballot in the mid-terms, Congress is. In fact, all this Republican dissent over Bush's agenda (Miers, Katrina and Dubai Ports deal are the usual examples here) could actuall help the Republican party in November. The more Bush mucks up, the more opportunity Senators and Representatives have to distance themselves from him. His historically low poll numbers are irrelevant if other Republicans can distance themselves enough and voters seem to have short enough memories that they might buy this.

There's still time for the Democrats to build a coherent message but I'm not sure they can and I'm pretty sure they won't be able to do so on those most pressing of issues - Iraq and Iran. No one seems to know what to do in either of those situations, and I'm not going to pretend that I do either. In fact there might not be too many options that actually look like victory in either sphere, a slightly less worse defeat might have to be the choice made in the end. But I don't think American voters will vote against Republicans because Bush messed up the Iraq war (which even the founder of the National Review now acknowledges). They'll only vote for Democrats if they can convince them that they have a workable plan and I don't think even the Democratic base believes that they do. The desire for change is strong in the US at the moment but I think the only change that we're likely to see this year is a more independent (from the president) and slightly less numerous Republican party.

I'll Take the Puppet, Thanks

2006-03-20T12:11:00.000+10:30

The site of the Queen looking like she was falling asleep during the opening ceremony of the commonwealth games makes the issue of whether Australia should continue to be a monarchy somewhat topical. The starting point of any honest discussion of the issue has to be an acknowledgement that the Queen (and the Governor General) is pretty impotent. This is in stark contrast to her (and his) huge constitutional power. Take ss.57-60:

57....
The members present at the joint sitting may deliberate and shall vote together upon the proposed law as last proposed by the House of Representatives, and upon amendments, if any, which have been made therein by one House and not agreed to by the other, and any such amendments which are affirmed by an absolute majority of the total number of the members of the Senate and House of Representatives shall be taken to have been carried, and if the proposed law, with the amendments, if any, so carried is affirmed by an absolute majority of the total number of the members of the Senate and House of Representatives, it shall be taken to have been duly passed by Houses of the Parliament, and shall be presented to the Governor-General for the Queen's assent.

58. When a proposed law passed by both Houses of the Parliament is presented to the Governor-General for the Queen's assent, he shall declare, according to his discretion, but subject to this Constitution, that he assents in the Queen's name, or that he withholds assent, or that he reserves the law for the Queen's pleasure. The Governor- General may return to the house in which it originated any proposed law so presented to him, and may transmit therewith any amendments which he may recommend, and the Houses may deal with the recommendation.

59. The Queen may disallow any law within one year from the Governor-General's assent, and such disallowance on being made known by the Governor-General by speech or message to each of the Houses of the Parliament, or by Proclamation, shall annul the law from the day when the disallowance is so made known.

60. A proposed law reserved for the Queen's pleasure shall not have any force unless and until within two years from the day on which it was presented to the Governor-General for the Queen's assent the Governor-General makes known, by speech or message to each of the Houses of the Parliament, or by Proclamation, that it has received the Queen's assent.

Assent has never been witheld by either the Governor General or the Queen and the at the only time when our head of state was asked to actually intervene in our political system (during the constitutional crisis sparked by the Whitlam Dismissal in 1975) she declined to do so.

Symbolically, too, the Queen's attraction is waning. Apparently when the Queen visited Australia for the 1954 Olymic games, 400 schoolgirls fainted when they saw her (I heard that on TV and TV never lies). Now she's lucky to get 400 to go and see her at the airport. Australian's are apathetic about a lot of things and the monarchy gets more than its fair share of it.

All this is normally used as a segue into an argument that because the Queen is irrelevant to Australia as an independent 21st-century nation we should get rid of her. I'd argue the opposite - the Queen's impotence is the very reason why we should retain her. To steal someone else's phrasing, ultimate constitutional power has to lie somewhere and it's best vested in the person who has absolutely no legitimacy to use it.

If we end up voting for a Republic, the last referendum on the issue made it clear that we're going to get a head of state who is more than a figurehead. The puppet-president model was rejected there and polls indicated that people would have been much more inclined to vote for a directly elected head of state. This is exactly what we don't want. Such a president would get high and mighty ideas that he (and it would be a he) has a mandate to do such and such and indeed he probably would. There might be some advantages to having a strong and independent executive in certain countries (though it can be argued that it only works in the US, for example, when the executive is from a different party to Congress) but I simply can't see the need for it in Australia.

We don't need a directly elected president with veto power to ensure that the democratic will of the people is done, that's why we have a parliament. A presidential election would just create another round of expensive campaigning and advertising and another roadblock to the government of the day taking drastic reform action which might hurt substantial parts of the country in the short term. Given a choice between our impotent Queen and the only apparently viable Republic model I can't see why change would be good.

Book Review: Paradoxes from A to Z

2006-03-18T16:40:00.000+10:30

After reading this book (in an afternoon, while photocoping if you want to know) my suspicions have been confirmed - paradoxes are cool, philosophy is not. I'll start with the paradoxes are cool bit and pick out a few of my faves from this book.

The Unexpected Examination

A reliable teacher announces there will be a surprise exam on one weekday of the following week. The pupils reason that it can't be Friday, since if it hasn't come by Thursday evening they will expect it the following day, and then it won't be unexpected. If it hasn't come by Wednesday evening, they will rule out Friday for the reason just given: but then it too won't be a surprise on Thursday and so that day is ruled out too. And so on backwards through the week. So the teacher's announcement cannot be fulfilled.

I've encountered this one before and it's given a fancy hame here - a backwards induction argument. The solution presented here sounds like a cop-out to me, but I suppose it works in the real world. It derails the argument at the first step by presenting a third possibility which will (it is argued) inevitably exist in the student's mind on Thursday evening - that the teacher won't give a test at all. There's also a solution presented if the student is certain that there will be an exam, namely that there is a possibility that the exam will be expected, and thus the backward loop doesn't go any further back than Friday. Once again, I think that's a bit of a cop-out and my head still hurts a bit thinking about this.

The Lawyer (Euathlus)

Protagoras agreed to teach Euthalus law for a fee which was payable when the pupil won his first case. After the course, Euathlus did not take part in any lawsuits, and the impatient Protagoras sued for his fee. He reasoned that, if he won, Euathlus would be obliged by the court to pay his fee; if he lost, Euathlus would have won a case and so be contractually bound to pay. Euathlus reasoned that if Protagoras won he would not be bound to pay, for he did not have to pay until he won a case; if Protagoras lost, the court would have decided he need not pay. Who is right?

Some spoilsport philosopher (Leibniz) pointed out in 1646 that this isn't actually a paradox because the outcome is clear. The court should find for Euthalus because Protagoras has no right to recover the money and then he subsequently can be made to pay under the contract. Still, it's a fun little thought experiment and I actually prefer a third outcome (which wasn't discussed in the book) - I think the court could stimply stay the proceedings as an abuse of process in which case Euthalus doesn't "win" the case and doesn't have to pay.

The Ship of Theseus

Over a period of years, in the course of maintenance a ship has its planks replaced one by one - call this ship A. However, the old planks are retained and themselves reconstituted into a ship - call this ship B. At the end of this process there are two ships. Which one is the original ship of Theseus?

I've heard this story before, but without the twist that the old planks are used to build a "new" ship. The intuitive answer, for me, is A because if the old planks had just been discarded there would be no real question here. Also, if you say B is his real ship then at what point in time would A have ceased to become his ship? But the entry in this book points out a circumstance in which B seems the logical answer. Say A was getting dilapidated and Theseus decided to restore each plank individually and then place the restored planks together as he was going. This takes a long time and so that he has a ship while this restoration's going on he puts planks in the holes he has made in the original ship. I dunno, but if I were an insurance company I think I wouldn't pay out if the second ship got destroyed.

Galileo's Paradox

One the face of it there would seem to be more whole numbers (1, 2, 3, ...) than squares of those numbers (1, 4, 9, ...). But the whole numbers can all be pared off with their squares and so there are just as many of one as the other.

There are obviously a lot of paradoxes here which have to do with infinity, this is just the one which stood out most to me for some reason. It hurts my head if I think about it too hard and I didn't really understand the explanation provided (something to do with denumerable and 'Dedekind-infinite' sets) so I won't say anything more about this.

The Heap

10,000 grains suitably arranged make a heap. But, at no point can you convert a collection of grains that is a heap into one that is not, simply by removing a single grain. So it follows that a single grain makes a heap. For if we keep removing grains over and over again, say 9,999 times, at no point does it cease to be a heap. Yet we obviously know that a single grain is not a heap.

Apparently there's a number of approaches to this problem. The 'epistemic view' is that there is a sharp cutoff point at which a heap becomes not-a-heap, it's just that we can't detect it. This sounds like a cop-out to me, but apparently it's philosophically defeasible. Then there's the 'degrees of truth' position which says that the chain of reasoning which goes "if you take one grain away from 10,000, it's still a heap, thus if you take one grain away from 9,999..." all the way to "if you take one grain away from 3 it's still a heap" breaks down somewhere along the way because while some of those statements are true, some are less true and some are definately not true. But this just re-states the problem - where's the dividing line between "definately true" and "less true"? Perhaps answering "it depends on the person" to that is satisfactory. The final explanation given is something called "supervaluations" which kind of went over my head - it had something to do with stating a specific cutoff point, which can be different for different people, but which in aggregate create a range of "supertrue", "superfalse" and "neither" possibilities.

The Monty Hall Paradox

There are three doors, with a prize behind just one of them. The contestant picks a door but does not open it yet. She knows that the game host, Monty Hall, knows where the prize is and, when he opens another door to reveal nothing behind it, then he has used his knowledge to do so. The host then offers the opportunity of changing doors. She will double her chances of winning by accepting this offer.

This isn't really a paradox either, because the last sentence is a mathematical fact. The really mind bending part about this is that if someone who didn't know where the prize was just opened one of the two unselected doors at random and revealed that the prize wasn't there, the contestent's odds do not increase by opening the third door. Nevertheless, if she takes the host's offer up her odds of picking the prize double from 1/3 to 2/3. Why? Well, I don't really understand, but this is what the book says:

When the contestant first picks a door the chance that it has the prize is 1/3. She knows that the host will be able to open a door concealing no prize, since at least one of the other doors must be a loser. Hence she learns nothing new which is relevant to the probability that she has already chosen the winning door: that remains at 1/3. Since if she swaps she will not choose the door that the host has just revealed to be a loser, the opportunity to swap is equivalent to the opportunity of opening both the other doors instead of the one she has picked, which clearly doubles her chances of winning.

It sort of makes sense when you put it like that, but when I think about what she's actually doing and the fact that her chances don't improve if the person opening the door doesn't know they are choosing an empty one... it boggles my mind.

Anyway, I find paradoxes like this really interesting, especially while I'm photocopying, but this book has a fair bit of mind numbing philosophical hair splitting which lives up to the field's stereoypte. Take:
The Paradox of Soundness

This argument, A, is unsound. Therefore this argument, A, is unsound. If A is sound, then it is a valid argument with a true premis; but if its premis is true it is unsound. If A is unsound its premiss is true and A is invalid; but it cannot be invalid since its form is that of the trivially valid 'p, therefore p'. So it must be sound.

Therefore A is both sound and unsound.

Right. Or:
Richard's Paradox

The set of real numbers is definable in a finite number of words is denumerable. But then we can describe in finitely many words another real number formed from an enumeration of the members of this set. So there is a real number that is defined in the enumeration if and only if it isn't.

Good to know. Or take the repeated explanation of the resolutions to the liar paradox (if I say that I am lying, am I telling the truth?). The resolutions are something like allowing contradictions to be, rationally, both true and false ("dialethism") and a method for creating a heirarchy of levels of statements. I'll freely admit that I don't really understand either of these. In fact I'll freely admit that most of the parts of this book that I didn't like were because I didn't understand them. In fact sometimes I couldn't even figure out why the problem was a paradox at all, like this one:
The Barber Shop Paradox (The Paradoxes of Material Implication)

A B and C work in a barber's shop. At least one of them has to stay in to mind the shop. So
(1) if C is out, then if A is out, B is in

A is too nervous to go out without B. So
(2) If A is out then B is out too.

It seems to follow that C can never go out. But this can't be right: C can be out provided A is in.

I can't for the life of me see how it seems that C can never go out according to those premises, but apparently it's worthy of serious philosophical discussion (and a lengthy explanation I couldn't follow). The difference for me between philosophy that I don't understand and other things that I don't understand, like advanced physics, is that I would like to be able to understand most things. I really don't care whether or not I can understand advanced philosophy. But maybe that's just me.

Quote of the Week

2006-03-18T08:30:00.000+10:30

I don't watch South Park very often but I did manage to catch its blizzarely hilarious Scientologist episode when it aired a couple of weeks ago so I'm not too surprised it upset Isaac Hayes (chef) enough that he quit the show and Tom Cruise enough that he put pressure on Comedy Central to pull the repeat screening. Stone and Parker's response to this is pretty funny if you're familiar with Scientology "theology":

So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!

And if you haven't seen the episode... **cough**.

Picture of the Week

2006-03-18T07:46:00.000+10:30

This duck was a random and inscruitable centrepiece of Melbourne's Commonwealth Games opening ceremony so luckly Leunig (who organised it) offered an explanation in the paper the next day. Except the explanation didn't really do much except confirm that Leunig's completely unhinged, seeing as it's a random paen to the athletes of Communist Russia which somehow embody the spirit of the duck. I don't understand either, but I bet Leunig thinks he's making some big statement by pointing out, with a duck, the fact that our enemies (scare quotes) are humans too. I love artists.

Caricaturing Themselves

2006-03-14T09:17:00.000+10:30

The whole Danish cartoon thing has slipped off the radar by now, but an interview with a Sydney artist on the radio a couple of days ago reminded me of it. This artist had made a Tazo-like disc which had an icon of Jesus' face which morphed into Osama Bin Laden's face when you moved it. This artist was trying to make the usual Artist Statement that the War on Terror (in scare quotes no doubt) was really about "fundamentalism on both sides". The interesting part of the interview was that the artist was disappointed that her deliberate attempt to shock Christians had failed, she said "A Nun saw it and giggled. A born again Christian just laughed." She was obviously quite surprised and a little disappointed by this as she said she had hoped to shock people.

Whether or not the now infamous (and now hiding for their lives) Danish cartoonists had intended to shock people, they certainly managed to inflame sentiments strong enough to spark weeks of rioting, embassy burning, Dutch pastry boycotting and killing. There's not much funny about this self-carituring reaction of the Muslim mobs, but I couldn't help but laugh at one journalist's comments after his close encounter with Lebanese rioters:

I return home to work on an assignment I owe Men's Journal, a one-page guide to Lebanon for adventure travelers. What the hell am I going to write? Great food, stylish women, and rampaging mobs of young Muslim men burning cars: Yes, Beirut is once again the Paris of the Middle East!

Anyhow the most interesting part of all of this was why news of the cartoon publications took over three months to reach the Arabic world. A Muslim diarist a Kos had an interesting take on the situation (the whole diary entry is worth reading, it begins with an informed discussion of whether or not depicting Muhammed is blasphemous in the first place and describes other depictions of him which haven't sparked rioting):

What CNN and the other traditional media failed to tell you is that the thousand gallons of fuel added to the fire of outrage came from none other than our old pals Saudi Arabia.

While it was a minor side story in the western press, the most important of Muslim religious festivals recently took place in Saudi Arabia - called the Hajj. Every able-bodied Muslim is obligated to make a pilgrimage once in their lifetime to Mecca, which is in modern-day Saudi Arabia. This pilgrimage can be done at any time of the year but most pilgrims arrive during the Muslim month known as Dhu al-Hijjah, which follows a lunar calendar that does not exactly match the western Gregorian calendar.

The most recent Hajj occurred during the first half of January 2006, precisely when the "outrage" over the Danish cartoons began in earnest. There were a number of stampedes, called "tragedies" in the press, during the Hajj which killed several hundred pilgrims. I say "tragedies" in quotation marks because there have been similar "tragedies" during the Hajj and each time, the Saudi government promises to improve security and facilitation of movement to avoid these. Over 251 pilgrims were killed during the 2004 Hajj alone in the same area as the one that killed 350 pilgrims in 2006. These were not unavoidable accidents, they were the results of poor planning by the Saudi government.

And while the deaths of these pilgrims was a mere blip on the traditional western media's radar, it was a huge story in the Muslim world. Most of the pilgrims who were killed came from poorer countries such as Pakistan, where the Hajj is a very big story. Even the most objective news stories were suddenly casting Saudi Arabia in a very bad light and they decided to do something about it.

Their plan was to go on a major offensive against the Danish cartoons. The 350 pilgrims were killed on January 12 and soon after, Saudi newspapers (which are all controlled by the state) began running up to 4 articles per day condemning the Danish cartoons. The Saudi government asked for a formal apology from Denmark. When that was not forthcoming, they began calling for world-wide protests.

There's also the interesting question of whether or not the Danish newspaper should have published the images in the first place. TNR took an uncharacteristic stance by coming out against the publication:

So responding to the thuggishness is easy. Responding to the cartoons themselves is harder. It is hard to condemn them when the barbaric response in parts of the Islamic world so vastly dwarfs the initial offense. And yet, the cartoons should be condemned nonetheless. Of course, the Danish newspaper had the right to publish them. But, in doing so, it revealed a particularly European prejudice, one that the United States must take care not to repeat.

The prejudice is not simply against Islam. Rather, it stems from Europe's--or at least Western Europe's--inability to take religion seriously at all.
...
In defending his decision to print the cartoons, the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten declared, "This is about the question of integration and how compatible is the religion of Islam with a modern secular society." In defending its decision to reprint them, the French paper France Soir wrote, "No religious dogma can impose its view on a democratic and secular society."

But most Americans - like most Muslims- do not think "modern" and "democratic" equal secular

Sullivan made a similar point:

Here's a summary of the key demand from a largely peaceful demonstration in London:

"Their freedom of speech should be restricted because it hurts our religion. At the end of the day everyone needs to respect others' religions. And we should strive for peace."

This is the voice of moderate Islam, and it's important to listen. The great problem we have is that an essentially fundamentalist faith, which resists the capacity for internal dialogue, which refuses to subject its holiest texts to dispassionate scholarship, which regulates all aspects of human life very aggressively, and which aims at the submission of other religions - this faith now has to reconcile itself with a Western world long since accustomed to complete intellectual freedom, brutal satire, free-wheeling debate and secular government. To make matters worse, at the same time, we have even more extreme versions of the same faith - the Islamists and their terrorist allies - who eagerly take advantage of the polarization and alienation that already affects many Western Muslims. If we defend our freedoms, we risk pushing the moderates into the hands of the extremists. If we sacrifice our freedoms a little, we legitimize the very arguments that make theocracy possible, and invite the terrorists to push for more.

After this breif moment of reflective introspection, he lapsed back into his usual militant clash of civilisations mode:

Leave aside the issue of mob violence for a moment. No moderate Muslim or "sensitive" Westerner is defending that. What of the non-violent request: that one faith be granted its taboos, that Western culture must abide by them, that the law be reformed to protect religious faiths from blasphemy or offense? It seems to me that we should indeed avoid gratuitous insult of Islam, and Christianity, or any faith. But it is a complete delusion to believe that the major source of our problem today is something called "Islamophobia." No: the problem is terrorism and tyranny propagated under the banner of Islam.

The bit in bold here is, I think, the essential question. If indeed the large and heterogenous group which is homogenously labelled "moderate Muslims" cannot tolerate a society which does not actively outlaw blasphemy against their holy figures then there is a real issue here. The whole defence of publishing the cartoons really is a defence of an non-negotiable freedom of speech ideal.

But I think the situation isn't as black and white as this. While the violent rioting element of the anti-cartoon riots isn't going to be satisfied with anything other than a re-making of our society in their image, that's a fringe element which should be analysed separately from the issue of whether or not it is wise to deliberately offend an increasingly marginalised group such as European Muslims. Of course we can't give into demands to make such speech illegal, of course our governments shouldn't be forced to apologise for the actions of its private citizens/press and of course the violent response to the cartoons is obscenely outrageous. But while Muslims minorities inhabit such a marginal place in society as they do in Europe at the moment, I'd agree with Beinart in the TNR piece I linked earlier that the publishing of the cartoons was unwise (just as publishing an Iranian paper's retaliatory holocaust denying cartoons would be unwise). It would be great if Muslims could feel secure enough in their religion that (arguably) blasphemous acts such as this were taken with the eqanimity shown by the response to the Sydney artist's Jesus/OBL creation, but the available evidence is that we're not there and it's this reality that newspapers and cartoonists should deal with.

You Cant Script This...

2006-03-13T11:30:00.000+10:30

Way off topic, I know, but I can't resist posting on what has got to be the best Cricket match ever. For non-Australian's, Australia and South Africa (1st and 2nd best teams in the world) just finished the fifth and deciding match in their limited over series (these are one day matches compared to the more traditional five day test matches). A normal score total in these matches is 250-275, more than 300 is usually a certain victory and no one's ever beaten a score of 350 or more. The highest ever score was 399, which was a reasonably good team (Sri Lanka) against a really bad team (Kenya). Well last night that all got thrown on its head when Australia scored an incredible world record score of 434 in their innings (in Cricket, one side bats first to score runs and then the other side chases that total). And then they lost, and just to make things even more amazing South Africa scored the winning runs on the last ball of the match with only one wicket remaining (this means if one more of their batsmen had gotten out they would have lost). To someone who has been following cricket since I could comprehend the world around me (I demanded to be referred to as Alan Border on my two year old birthday cards!) this just boggles the mind. It's got to have been the best Cricket match ever.

The interesting question to me is how this perfect storm came about. One obvious answer has got to be the bowlers. Look at the scorecard... when Australia has to have the untested Lewis bowling 10 overs (for 113!) there's some depth lacking. This is pretty strong evidence Australia is really going to feel the loss of McGrath when he has to retire properly, as good as Lee is (though 7.5 for 68 isn't impressive) he can't possibly fill McGrath's unique ability to bowl accurately and cheaply. Looking at the stats, South Africa probably suffered from a similarly poor bowling line up.

But I can't help wondering if the new 20-20 format is having an effect on the broader game. In those matches a run rate of 10 an over is, bizzarely, pretty much normal. Getting much worse scores than that is also common, if early wickets fall, but once batsmen throw off the mental restraints which come from longer versions of cricket it's obvious that very high run rates can be achieved reasonably consistently in that format. Perhaps in the final match of an unusually closely contested series (after a home series where Australia demolished South Africa) the batsmen went into 20-20 mode... and it worked, for both teams. I dunno, but it's my theory and I'm sticking to it for the moment!

Normal services will resume shortly...

Tax Simplification

2006-03-11T14:22:00.000+10:30

I wrote late last year about some of the problems with tax simplification, namely that the tax laws are necessarily complicated in order to curb tax avoidance. Well Colebatch pointed out in The Age recently that we're doing really poorly on the anti-avoidance front, too:

First, in 2002-03, 10 per cent of all tax deductions claimed for payments to tax advisers were claimed by people who ended up paying no tax at all. With just 3 per cent of total income, they claimed more than $100 million in deductions for tax advice.

This tells us we have a tax system wide open for rorting. Those able to afford smart tax planners can choose how much tax they pay. And more and more are opting to pay no tax at all.

Second, the tax statistics report that in the five years to 2002-03, the number of people actually paying tax rose by four (yes, four). The number of people filing returns but paying no tax at all rose by 355,277.

OK, those are provisional figures, which exclude half a million of us who file our tax returns seriously late. But compare them with the equivalent figures five years ago, and the trend is clear. The number of people paying tax rose just 4.6 per cent in five years. The number paying no tax at all rose by 31 per cent.

They're pretty damning statistics. As it happens, tax reform and simplification is something I'm beginning to look at in Tax Law at the moment. I found a fascinating article which neatly explains the basic problems and tensions in the area (Krever, 'Taming Complexity in Income Tax Law', 2003 if you're interested).

At the outset I think it's hard for people who aren't familiar with the arcane mess that is our Tax Law (this definatley includes me) to undersand either why things are so complicated or how avoidance works. At the most basic level avoidance is possible because different things are taxed at different rates. If you can dress up something which might fall into the higher taxed class as something in the lower tax class then you pay less tax and it's good for you. The government doesn't like this and so passes a specific amendment to outlaw this particular artificial dressing up. Someone figures out a way around this (and is endorsed by a judiciary which takes a very accepting approach to avoidance by reading tax legislation extremely strictly) and so more amendments are passed. Repeat this for a few decades and you end up with a Tax Act which is thousands of pages long and full of so many specific rules inserted in between old rules that sub-sub sections like 159GZZZBA are relatively common.

Interestingly, the article points out that the most widely abused difference, that between income (which is taxed at fairly high income tax rates) and capital gains (which is taxed initally not at all and recently less and less by Liberal governments) was actually a distinction initially created in Australia by judges who were importing inappropriate trust law concepts. This makes all the after the fact policy justifications of different treatment of investment income look somewhat like an attempt to justify taxing wealth people less than everyone else.

A related, fundamental, complicating factor is "tax expenditure". I've complained about this before but in essence tax expenditure is using tax deductions and concessions to encourage a particular activity or alleviate pressure on a certain lobby group. In addition to the reasons why it's bad which I outlined in the previous post, tax expenditure has the negative effect of forcing even more complicated legislation to try and stop people re-designing their affairs to take advantage of the concession. It is for this reason that, for example, there are 40 different types of "capital gain events" which apply to different forms of capital gains, each with complicated definitional provisions to try and stop one type of gain being structured to look like another.

Anyway, combine these together and you get farcical situations like these:

In other cases, taxpayers sought to extract company profits by way of a sale of shares in a company rather than directly as dividends, since gains on the sale of shares were completely exempt from tax while dividends were fully taxed. When the tax law made a distinction between gains on shares sold less than a year after acquisition (which were fully taxed) and those made on shares sold a year or more after acquisition (where were completely tax exempt), taxpayers owhing both types of shares in a company would arrange for the company to modify its constitution so all value was shifted from recently acquired shares to ones held for more than a year. When the tax legislation imposed full tax on domestic source interest and exempted intereste derived offshore provided it was subject to nominal tax even in a tax haven, taxpayers devised paper transactions to shift the source of income from domestic banks that actually guaranteed the debt to notional deposists offshore. When the tax law imposed high tax on income diverted to a child via a trust established directly by the child's parent, parents would arrange for a friend or accountant to establish the trust and then deposit an amount in the already established trust. When the tax law required upfront recognition of the interest component of a blendend payment loan but allowed deferred recognition of gain if the loan was structured as an annuity, taxpayers opted to call their loans annuities. Examples are legion.

The article partly confirms my contention that tax simplification is an undesirable/unattainable goal because the complexity is there to prevent the system being rorted more than it already is. But it also points out the inherent futility of such short term fixes, a futility which is starkly demonstrated by Colebatch's article. What's needed ain't more band aids, we need tax reform.

This brings me back to the tax reform barrow I've been pushing basically since I started this blog. Piecemeal tax simplification measures and buying off certain portions of the electorate with tax concessions create internal pressures in the tax system which necessitate wholesale reform. This reform is not about cutting taxes. It's about base broadening (eg. eliminating tax deductions to stop people structuring purchases so that they look like deductable expenses) and reducing the differential taxation of different sources of income. If the government wants to encourage a particular action, like superannuation or investing in income producing assets or owning a small business, it should directly subsidy them because not doing so means that those who can afford to will purchase themselves a tax free income. And those who either can't afford to or who have less structural ability to fudge their income figures - ie wage earners - will bear a higher and higher share of the tax burden.

Picture of the Week

2006-03-09T09:23:00.000+10:30

I stole these graphs from my tax law lecturer because the relationship they show between tax and child poverty rates is pretty compelling:

The correlation here certainly isn't perfect - "CHE" (Chezk republic?) for instance has low poverty and low tax and Austria and New Zealand don't get much bang for their buck - but more tax = less child poverty seems like a pretty strong relationship.

Quote of the Week

2006-03-09T08:38:00.000+10:30

An interesting tidbit from an admittedly hyperbolic, but occasionally worthwhile, article. Former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani from a couple of years ago:

"If, one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill, because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." Here Rafsanjani is dispassionately thinking through the implications of a genocidal policy in which one nuclear bomb dropped near Tel Aviv would effectively destroy geographically tiny Israel. He gladly declares to his nation and the world that the costs--including hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Iranians dead as a result of nuclear retaliation from Israel's invulnerable nuclear-armed submarines--would be worth it.

Compulsory Voting

2006-03-07T13:49:00.000+10:30

Australia’s political climate is relatively moderate. We don't have the hypercharged ideological divisions and staunch conservatism that characterises the US scene and we don't have the sort of extreme left wing ideologues that have arisen in recent years in a number of Latin American countries. Our taxes are higher than the US and SE Asia, but lower than northern Europe. Our position on social and welfare issues is pretty much in the middle of those two blocks, too. I don't really know why this is, but one reason that's sometimes given is our voting system which is almost unique among developed countries for being compulsory.

The argument goes that compulsory voting means that there's no need for either major party to have extreme policies designed to fire up the base because there will be no corresponding gain from increased turnout to be had. The base will vote, directly or with preferences, for their respective parties anyway and so the parties concentrate on winning votes in the swinging center.

I'm not sure I buy this. There's plenty of countries with voluntary voting which have moderate political climates. Blair invented the 'third way' in the UK. An attempt by the person who is now Canadian PM to chase after US-style Conservatives backfired in the election and he only became electable once he moderated (corruption by the incumbents didn't hurt either). The recently elected Merkel in Germany is a moderate (despite the fantasising of some US Conservatives). New Zealand's recent election was mostly a race for the center, though somewhat disrupted by some anti-Maori pandering (and unforgettable use of the word testicles) by the conservative challengers. And all of those countries have a voluntary franchise. In fact, the more you look at it, the argument that voluntary voting leads to an extreme and fractured political landscape looks more like evidence of US exceptionalism (in the same way that an apparent statistical link between religion and social dysfunction really demonstrated a link between social dysfunction and living in Southern America).

The other major practical argument for a compulsory franchise is that when voting is voluntary the people who are least likely to vote are poor and marginal social groups and that it's important that these people's opinions have an effect on political decisions. This seems persuasive, but I'd question whether it has any real effect. There are countries with voluntary voting which do much better for their poor than we do (see my upcoming picture of the week). I don't think there's persuasive evidence that forcing marginalised groups to vote leads to better outcomes for them.

A final argument put forward for compulsory voting is that there's nothing wrong with forcing citizens to take half an hour every three years to participate in the voting process. Voting, like taxation, is a social duty which is rightly enforced by the government. This argument looks circular to me. Sure, the state can make people do a whole lot of things if it wants to and call them civil duties, but unless there's some practical benefit then it's kind of pointless. Taxes get government money. Forcing people to vote does what? Educates them about the voting system? Makes people less apathetic? Improves voting outcomes? I don't think it does any of these things.

There's still enormous amounts of apathy among the general public about politics most of the time and the extra attention that compulsory voting creates around election time just encourages the sort of middle class spending bonanza which burdens us with the private health care rebate, the baby bonus, rural spending rorts and 3 yearly bribes for old people. Coverage an attention focuses on whether or not such and such a demographic will be financially better off under which party and there's no constituency for spending restraint and reform (did anyone complain about the baby bonus except to say that it wasn't enough money?). The race for the vital center, from what I've seen in Australian elections, is just a race to spend the most money on middle class groups who may be able to swing marginal seats. It's not political moderation and it's certainly not appeals to poor/marginalised groups who might not vote if voting was voluntary.

What's more, making a lot of a-political people vote means that the chance of irrational voting patterns is even higher than in other countries. By irrational voting I'm talking donkey voting or voting for the guy who has the best campaign image/five second sound bite. Literally half of the people I spoke to after the last Australian election voted for Howard because Latham was ugly and/or did that really weird handshake thing. Sure these people have a right to vote because of these things if they want, but I don't think that increasing the number of these sorts of votes is a good policy outcome.

I think it's clear that I'm basically unconvinced about compulsory voting. Despite being a small practical inconvenience to people, there is a theoretical problem with the government forcing people to exercise their franchise. It eliminates the ability of people to express their dissatisfaction with or apathy towards the political process by not participating (I realise people can cast an invalid vote, but the reality is that most don't, even if they otherwise wouldn't vote). There's an argument to be made along the lines of if it ain't broke, don't fix it but I wouldn't be upset if we were given a legal choice not to vote.

Righting Religion

2006-03-03T20:36:00.000+10:30

There is a lot of fear among the left about religious types. It's rarely made explicit but it's an undercurrent of an awful lot of writing about concerned leftys about the "rise of the religious right" and the threat this supposedly poses to Australia's generally secular government system.* There was an extremely revealing post by AnonymousLefty mid last year which is worth quoting in full (so sue me :):

Organised Religion
Finally, as we were on our way to MrsLefty's parents' house, we passed a hippy modern fundy church, filled with happy-clappy fundies on their big Saturday night out. And it reminded me of a fear I have sometimes regarding the culture wars.

Guys, the religious people are much better organised than we are.

They meet every Sunday. For hours at a time. They constantly talk about this stuff. And, whilst we think these sorts of issues are a matter of fairness and justice - they think they're about HEAVEN or HELL. Souls. Eternity. That's motivation.

But mainly, it's their being much better organised that scares me. What kind of agnostic gets up at 9am on Sunday to meet with other agnostics to confirm that we're not sure what we believe in at this point? None of us, that's who. Stubborn belief in a specific religion is always going to win out over stubborn non-committalness, I fear. The only thing we've got going for us is that we've got sex, violent video games, and logic/science on our side. Otherwise we'd be stuffed.

Rarely is the fear that secular leftists have of religious types so openly expressed. It's not a particularly rational or logical fear, despite his claim that atheists have a monopoly on rationality and logic, but it's a very widespread one.

How can I say that it's not a rational or logical fear? Surely the religious right is running the country! We're on a slippery slope to a theocracy here aren't we? Take La Trobe professor Denis Altman in The Age last week:

The real threat in contemporary Australia to secularism is revealed in Danna Vale's apology in Saturday's Age in which she positions "mainstream Australia" against "Muslim Australians", implicitly suggesting that "mainstream Australia" is de facto Christian. She and Costello voted on opposite sides on RU486, but the move to restrict abortions is only one of a long series of issues in which the threat to secularism comes from conservative Christians and their supporters within the Government.

The Government has frequently acknowledged Catholic and evangelical concerns in its appointments and policies.

And he goes on to give a huge number of concrete, material examples of Theocracy-lite laws being enacted by the present government at the behest of religious leaders. Uhhh, actually he cites precisely two before rambling on about random stuff unrelated to the point he was apparently trying to prove:

What sort of model of a secular state did the Government offer in appointing an archbishop as governor-general? The fate of that particular appointment was its own reward. Does Costello's own opposition to gay marriage accept that religious doctrines should not influence public policy?

The Governer General appointment is laughably unimportant. No one would have known the guys name if he hadn't said/believed some really dumb things about paedophilic priests. The gay marriage thing is a weak example of a Christian-imposed law. For one, as Andrew Sullivan wryly noted recently 'the one thing that can unite Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians is hatred of gay people', which is in direct contrast to Altman's point that Christian morality is opposed to the views of Muslims and antiethical to multiculturalism. More importantly, the law didn't actually do anything other than confirm the status quo and was really an attempted wedge to show Labor as being 'politically correct elites' out of touch with 'ordinary Australia' which is (according to the analysis at the time, but I can't actually google any stats) opposed to Gay marriage - probably more out of a residual conservative predjudice of the unknown than any Christian ethic.

But if I have to give the scaremongers one point, I spose I can give them that. But that's all. Australia is in no danger of becoming overrun by the religious right. In case he didn't notice, ministerial control over RU-486 was removed recently in the face of a campaign by vocal pro-life groups. Abortion is still (in practice) legal. Divorce is no fault. The last oppposition leader was an atheist (something you'd never see in the States). We're not gonna tell unmarried partners that they can't live with thier kids (the story is actually a bit less sensationalist, but still). Sodomy, alcohol, porn and prostitution are legal. And... I'm desperately trying to think of another issue on which there is the remotest possibility that theocratic laws could be enacted. The fact of the matter is that the government doesn't spend very much time legislating on hot button moral issues and on all the issues - save gay marriage - where they could, conceivably, anyone who is looking for signs of theocratic laws will be disappointed. And they won't just find an absence of 'Christian laws' they'll find an almost complete absence of meaningful debate. The secular-law side won, convincingly.

So the fear of the religious right and religious fundamentalism is unjustified from a practical perspective. If there is a 'enact religious laws' movement in Australia it's losing and it's not gaining more than the faintest hint of power. But it's unjustified from another perspective. Most Christian fundamentalists have no desire to try and get their morality turned into law. Before I continue I should also clear up the proper definition of a Christian Fundamentalism. It's belief in:

Inerrancy of the Scriptures
The virgin birth and the deity of Jesus
The doctrine of substitutionary atonement through God's grace and human faith
The bodily resurrection of Jesus
The authenticity of Christ's miracles

A definition which includes myself so I'm at least a bit qualified to speak on the issue. The New Testament does a pretty good job of establishing that a nation's laws are irrelevant to a person's morality. You can hardly imagine a society more hostile to the message that early Christians preached than one which regularly imprisoned, tortured, exiled and martyred believers. And yet there was no movement to change the nature of that authories. There was an injunction that 'it is better to obey god, rather than man' where laws directly stopped an individual from being a practicing Christian, but the other side of the coin - that the government should be used to actively promote Christian ethics - was completely absent. Romans 13 contains the fullest New Testament discussion of a Christian's relationship with government and it's pretty much an expansion what Jesus said ('render unto Caesar') - pay your taxes and obey the law (other than where they prevent religious belief, as explained elsewhere).

My point is that there's no reason to be afraid of religious fundamentalism from a social policy perspective. It's a personal belief system which doesn't, in any way, mandate that practicioners attempt to enact their beliefs into law. There does exist in America a political movement - Dobson, Robertson et al. - which uses religion as a tool to gain political power. But that's a political, not a religious movement and there's no signs that it's gaining serious traction in this country.

*Note that I am limiting my comments here purely to the Australian scene, obviously there's different situations in other countries.

Trademarks in the (Not) Free Market

2006-03-02T11:36:00.000+10:30

I've explained my antipathy towards the modern marketing practice of branding a couple of times before on this blog. My concerns are based on two broad factors. First there is the cultural ramifications of the mass deception of consumers (which is the end goal of modern marketing), the effect of increasingly pervasive commercial symbols and transactions dominating people's social interactions and aspirations and the stifling effect of brand protection on artistic and political expression. More concretely, there are the economic inefficiencies created by the present branding system. These inefficiencies include the massive 'rent seeking' (wasted expenditure on uninformative advertising) engaged in by large firms in concentrated oligopolistic markets and poor consumer decisions made due to artificially manufactured preferences.

Anyway, at the heart of the branding empire is trademarks. Without legal protection of trademark rights companies would be unable to differentiate their product and maintain the sort of consumer 'relationship' necessary to create a brand image. The basic justification for trademark protection is easy to see. Without it, a company's logos, marks and even name would be easily copied and thus an individual firm be unable to build a reputation in the marketplace. Thus, they would be unable to create and profit from a reputation for making quality products. Competition would degenerate into pure price competition and few goods of greater than minimal quality would be produced (in the mass market).

Additionally, consumer search costs would increase. If you were looking for a particular flavour which you know is produced by a certain manufacturer you would have to somehow ascertain that a particular item was made by that manufacturer without any of the unique symbols, marks, colours, packaging etc. which we presently take for granted. Even if it were possible to conclusively determine which product was made by which company, search costs would increase if, say, this was done by reading the fine print manufacturing details on the back of a number of similarly packaged products.

But why do we have to endure the sort of advertising and marketing onslaught around us today in order to capture these benefits? Surely we could find a way of allowing companies to maintain product difference and consumers to find the products they're looking for which doesn't have the sort of negative, wasteful side effects that the current system does. There is no in-principle problem with this from even a free market perspective. Because, and this should be obvious, trademarks are not a creation of the free market. They're a specific governmental policy response to a market failure (the exceptionally high transaction costs of creating a contractual network which could duplicate the effects of trademark protection).

Unfortunately as I thought about it a bit more I couldn't think of many specific limitations of trademark rights which would be all that effective without massive side effects. I do think there should be reasonbly broad exceptions to trade mark rules to allow the use of marks in artistic works (eg. barbie art - note, I don't know the Australian law in this area, yet). But anything which sought to broadly limit the content or delivery of advertising messages would have free speech ramifications and be a nightmare to police (eg. try and think of a law which could ensure that ads were 'informative' and not merely 'persuasive'). Any attempt to limit the amount which could be spent on advertising would have major implications (new products/companies would find it harder to break into the market, setting the level would be a nightmare). Anyway, I'm just starting a trademarks subject so I might pick up more ideas, but while I can't see any in principle objection to restricting the protection which the government grants companies via trademark laws, I think there's some practical problems.

I'm Back

2006-03-02T11:10:00.000+10:30

Well, after all that time off I have a scintillating lineup of articles in the wing. Brand new political theories! Interviews with world leaders! Analysis which will blow your socks of! Designs for revolutionary economic systems! An infallibable solution to the problem of scarcity! And, well, none of the above really. It'll be business as usual. A couple of articles a week when I feel like it, some lazy "quote/picture" of the week links, the odd book review, a bunch of spelling mistakes and too many big words. Topics I've got in my head at the moment are trade marks, compulsory voting, cartoon shenanigans, why the Democrats ain't gonna do to do so well in this year's mid-terms, neo-conservative meltdown, why the religious right doesn't exist in Australia and *yawn* maybe a bit of Australian federal politics. Enjoy...

Inspiration-less

2006-01-03T14:36:00.000+10:30

The reason I haven't posted in the last week is because I've been away. But I'm back now and honestly don't have very much to post on. It's harder for me to post during the uni break because I don't have the net at home and so usually go days without reading anything interesting online. Anyway, I started this blog as an outlet for the thoughts bumping around in my head and for the moment at least I don't have any of them. If I posted it would be a bit like most of the posts in the the last month - dodgy little re-posts of other people's writing. Finding something to post in that way feels too much like work to me, so I'm taking a break for at least a month. Drop by in February if you like, I may start posting again then or I may make this hiatus indefinate. And thanks to you guys for reading and commenting so far.

Choice Revisited

2005-12-26T16:05:00.000+10:30

I've seen two interesting replies to a previous post of mine on whether or not more choice is always better. One was from an old workmate of mine who is a proper economist (ie he uses maths - fake economists like me don't!). He had this to say about the issue:

Just one comment on the 'Economics and Choice' article, while I agree with the general thrust of the argument, the counter-factual is always that restricting choice is unlikely to be welfare improving. Taking your toothpaste example, if I do have an explicit preference for one brand, and that brand is taken off the market, then my utility falls. Yours may slightly increase as you are less confused by the range of choices, but I doubt the increase in your utility would match the reduction in mine.

I would also note that the assumption that more choice is welfare increasing depends on the formulation of individual's utility function. Dixit and Stiglitz (around 1977) specified a utility function of the form:

u = {ci^j

Where:

u = individual utility
{ = summation sign
ci = consumption of good i (think of it in terms of the number of dollars you spend on good i)
^ = raised to the power of
j = a constant that reflects the individual's taste for variety

So under this formulation, with a limited budget, the more goods you can choose from, the higher your utility (the maths works).

However, if your utility function is a simple linear function, eg:

u = {ci

u = individual utility
{ = summation sign
ci = consumption of good i

Then you can have the same utility spending all your income on one good as if you spent 1/n of your income on n goods.

I'm sure you get the point, and you were addressing the philosophical side more than the model-building side, but it is important to note that this is how economists work. We can build in whatever assumptions we want to, and there is no theory that is not vulnerable to a slight shift in a parameter in a utility (or some other) function.

Two good points there - economics isn't a monolithic discipline, assumptions can be changed at will and the costs of more choice should obviously be weighed agains the benefits. As to the benefits, there's another aspect to it which was pointed out by one of Sullivan's guest bloggers:

The choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee may not matter much to the chooser but it matters a lot to Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

In other words: Maybe ceteris paribus having to pick from 20 very similar sorts of corn flakes at the supermarket is just an added hassle, and we'd be just as well off if the supermarket only stocked one or two of them. But ceteris ain't never paribus: Having to compete with 19 other close substitues puts strong price and quality pressure on each manufacturer. So it's not enough to point out that choice between a gaggle of similar products might be more annoying than a choice between some small subset of those same products—if the choice set were persistently limited for everyone, then you wouldn't have those same products, put probably significantly worse ones. The fact that some people agonize over which of a dozen sorts of corn flakes to buy means you're likely to do better picking one at random than if you agonized over the choice between the only two brands in the world.

That's also a really good point. Copious amounts of choice is often a result of competition in the market and competition is usually good from a consumer's perspective. So I'll accept that me getting annoyed by having too many brands of toothpaste to choose from is probably outweighed by the overall benefits.

But I still think that there is a point here, which is the one the Slate article I extracted last time made. Sometimes the idea that "picking at random" in a high choice environment will lead to a better outcome than a careful choice in a low option world doesn't work. As I noted last time, this is likely to be in very complicated and risky areas such as health insurance and financial planning where the most salient features aren't necessarily the best ones to go on. But, yes, in general more choice isn't a bad thing.